This AZ-400 practice question tests your understanding of design and implement build and release pipelines. This is a configuration task: choose the command set that satisfies every stated requirement. Small differences — like 'secret' vs 'password' or 'transport input ssh' vs 'all' — change whether the answer is correct. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
You configured a multi-stage YAML pipeline with a deployment job that uses a deployment strategy like 'runOnce' or 'rolling'. You need to ensure that the deployment target is marked as 'succeeded' only after the deployment job completes successfully, and that any previous deployment to the same environment is preserved for rollback. Which setting must you configure?
Set the deployment job's 'continueOnError' to true
Why wrong: This would continue on failure, not preserve previous deployments.
Use the 'deployment' job with 'strategy: rolling'
Why wrong: This defines the update strategy but does not control retention of history.
Set the 'deploymentStrategy' to 'blueGreen'
Why wrong: Blue-green is a deployment strategy, but retention is still controlled by environment settings.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Set the environment's 'retain' property to 1 or more
Option A is correct because setting the environment's 'retain' property to 1 or more ensures that the previous deployment (e.g., the last successful run) is preserved as a 'retained' revision in the environment. This allows you to redeploy that specific revision for rollback purposes. The deployment job marks the environment target as 'succeeded' only after the job completes successfully, and retaining previous revisions prevents them from being automatically cleaned up.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
Set the deployment job's 'continueOnError' to true
Why it's wrong here
This would continue on failure, not preserve previous deployments.
Use the 'deployment' job with 'strategy: rolling'
Why it's wrong here
This defines the update strategy but does not control retention of history.
Set the 'deploymentStrategy' to 'blueGreen'
Why it's wrong here
Blue-green is a deployment strategy, but retention is still controlled by environment settings.
Option-by-option analysis
Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The AZ-400 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.
Why this is wrong here
This would continue on failure, not preserve previous deployments.
Why this is wrong here
This defines the update strategy but does not control retention of history.
Why this is wrong here
Blue-green is a deployment strategy, but retention is still controlled by environment settings.
Analysis generated from the official AZ-400blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates often confuse deployment strategies (rolling, blue-green) with revision retention, assuming that a strategy like 'rolling' or 'blueGreen' inherently preserves previous deployments for rollback, when in fact retention is a separate environment-level setting.
Detailed technical explanation
Under the hood, Azure Pipelines environments maintain a history of deployments, and each deployment revision is stored with metadata. The 'retain' property sets the minimum number of recent revisions to keep, preventing cleanup of older revisions that could be used for rollback. In a real-world scenario, if you set 'retain' to 0 (the default), only the latest revision is kept, so a rollback would require re-running the pipeline from a previous commit, which may not be feasible if the pipeline configuration has changed.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
A startup's cloud architect reviews their monthly bill and notices costs are higher than expected for a long-running batch job. Switching from on-demand instances to Reserved Instances — or using Spot/Preemptible VMs — can reduce compute costs by up to 72 %. Questions like this test whether you understand the tradeoffs between commitment, flexibility, and cost across cloud pricing models.
What to study next
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FAQ
Design and implement build and release pipelines — This question tests Design and implement build and release pipelines — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Set the environment's 'retain' property to 1 or more — Option A is correct because setting the environment's 'retain' property to 1 or more ensures that the previous deployment (e.g., the last successful run) is preserved as a 'retained' revision in the environment. This allows you to redeploy that specific revision for rollback purposes. The deployment job marks the environment target as 'succeeded' only after the job completes successfully, and retaining previous revisions prevents them from being automatically cleaned up.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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