mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
AZ-400 Practice Question: A company uses Azure Pipelines to deploy…
A company uses Azure Pipelines to deploy microservices to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). They want to implement a canary deployment strategy. What should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Front Door’s global traffic routing with Kubernetes-native traffic splitting, assuming a PaaS-level service can replace the granular, service-mesh-based canary logic required within a single AKS cluster.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use Kubernetes native deployment strategies with multiple replica sets and traffic splitting
Kubernetes natively supports canary deployments by running multiple replica sets of the same application and using a service mesh or ingress controller (e.g., Istio, NGINX Ingress) to split traffic between the stable and canary versions. Azure Pipelines can orchestrate this by updating the canary deployment and adjusting traffic weights gradually, enabling controlled rollouts and rollbacks without external routing services.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Kubernetes native deployment strategies with multiple replica sets and traffic splitting
Why this is correct
Kubernetes natively supports canary deployments by running multiple replica sets of the same microservice and gradually shifting traffic between them using a service mesh (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) or ingress controllers with traffic-splitting rules. This allows incremental rollout with fine-grained control and automatic rollback, making it the correct strategy for canary releases within an AKS cluster.
- ✗
Use Azure Front Door to route traffic between clusters
Why it's wrong here
Azure Front Door is a global, edge-based load balancer and CDN that routes traffic at the domain or URL path level across distinct backends, typically in different Azure regions. It has no awareness of Kubernetes Services, replica sets, or pod-level routing within a single AKS cluster, so it cannot dynamically split a percentage of traffic between canary and stable versions of the same microservice. Even if you exposed multiple cluster ingress endpoints as separate origins, Front Door's routing rules and health probes operate at the network edge, not as a Kubernetes-native traffic splitter, making it unsuitable for in-cluster canary deployments that require fine-grained, weight-based routing.
- ✗
Use deployment slots in Azure App Service
Why it's wrong here
Deployment slots are a feature of Azure App Service that enable staging and swap-based deployments for web apps, not for containerized workloads running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Slot swap semantics and warm-up behavior do not apply to AKS pods or services, so this option is inapplicable for canary deployments in a Kubernetes environment.
- ✗
Use Azure Container Instances as a staging environment
Why it's wrong here
Azure Container Instances (ACI) provides isolated containers for burstable or event-driven workloads, but it does not integrate with AKS's pod networking or service discovery to split traffic between canary and stable versions within the same cluster. ACI is not a replacement for Kubernetes-native resources like Deployments, Services, or service mesh traffic routing, making it unsuitable for canary deployment in AKS.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to DevOps and Azure DevOps
Key term
Canary deployment
A canary deployment is a software release strategy where a new version of an application is gradually rolled out to a small subset of users before being made available to everyone.
Key term
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines is a cloud-based CI/CD service from Microsoft that automatically builds, tests, and deploys code to any platform or cloud.
About these practice questions
This AZ-400 question is part of Courseiva's 823-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-400 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-400 exam.