AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement build and release pipelines
Which THREE are valid deployment patterns for Kubernetes? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse deployment patterns (like canary, rolling, blue-green) with deployment tools (like Helm) or traffic management techniques (like A/B testing), leading them to select options that are not actual Kubernetes rollout strategies.
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
✓
Canary deployment
The correct deployment patterns in Kubernetes are canary, rolling update, and blue-green. A canary deployment releases a new version to a small subset of users first, allowing monitoring and gradual traffic shifting. A rolling update incrementally replaces old pods with new ones, ensuring zero downtime. A blue-green deployment runs two identical environments and switches traffic from the old (blue) to the new (green) environment after validation. Helm is a package manager, not a deployment pattern, and A/B testing is a traffic management technique rather than a core Kubernetes deployment strategy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Canary deployment
Why this is correct
Canary deployment is a valid Kubernetes deployment pattern that incrementally routes a small percentage of live traffic to a new version while monitoring key metrics, gradually increasing the canary's share only when the new version proves stable, thereby reducing blast radius and enabling early rollback.
- ✓
Rolling update
Why this is correct
A rolling update is a valid Kubernetes deployment strategy that replaces old pods with new ones incrementally, respecting update and availability thresholds (e.g., maxSurge and maxUnavailable) to maintain service availability during the upgrade, and it can be automatically rolled back if the new ReplicaSet fails health checks.
- ✗
A/B testing deployment
Why it's wrong here
A/B testing is a comparison methodology used to evaluate user behavior or feature impact, not a deployment pattern; while you can use traffic routing (e.g., with service mesh or ingress) to implement A/B tests, Kubernetes itself does not treat A/B testing as a native deployment strategy, making it incorrect to classify as a deployment pattern.
- ✗
Helm deployment
Why it's wrong here
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that packages, configures, and deploys applications using Charts; it is a tool used to automate and manage deployments, but it is not itself a deployment pattern like canary, rolling, or blue-green, so it is incorrect as an answer for a Kubernetes deployment pattern.
- ✓
Blue-green deployment
Why this is correct
Blue-green deployment is a valid Kubernetes deployment pattern that runs two full environments (blue = current, green = new) simultaneously; after validating the green environment, traffic is switched atomically from blue to green, enabling instant rollback by switching traffic back to the blue environment, though it requires double the resources.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Source Control Strategy Design
Key term
Blue-green deployment
Blue-green deployment is a release strategy that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments, one live and one idle, enabling instant traffic switching between them.
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.
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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.