AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement build and release pipelines
You are designing a release strategy for a critical application that must maintain high availability. You decide to use Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic between deployments in two Azure regions. Your release pipeline deploys the application to the secondary region first, then switches Traffic Manager priority to route traffic to the secondary region while the primary region is updated. This strategy is known as:
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is that candidates may confuse this with rolling deployment because updates happen in stages. However, rolling deployment updates instances incrementally and gradually shifts traffic, whereas blue-green deployment performs an immediate all-or-nothing traffic switch between two pre-deployed environments. Traffic Manager priority routing is a failover/blue-green switch, not a gradual rolling shift.
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
✓
Blue-green deployment
This strategy is a blue-green deployment because it uses two complete environments (primary and secondary regions). The new version is deployed to the secondary (green) environment first, then Traffic Manager priority routing switches all traffic from the primary (blue) to the secondary (green). The primary is then updated while idle. This is the classic blue-green pattern applied across regions, not a rolling deployment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Blue-green deployment
Why this is correct
Blue-green deployment uses two identical environments (blue and green) with only one serving production traffic at a time, and a router instantly switches between them. This is a single-region or same-site technique that does not provide cross-region failover or disaster recovery, so it does not meet the cross-region requirement.
- ✗
Canary deployment
Why it's wrong here
Canary deployment incrementally routes a small percentage of live traffic to the new version to validate it before full rollout, reducing risk through gradual exposure. It is a traffic-splitting and monitoring strategy within a single deployment target, not a cross-region failover mechanism, so it does not satisfy cross-region release requirements.
- ✗
Red/Black deployment
Why it's wrong here
Red/Black deployment is essentially the same as blue-green: two complete environments (red and black) with one active and a full switchover between them. It does not involve distributing workloads across multiple geographic regions or automatically rerouting traffic region-by-region, so it cannot provide cross-region failover.
- ✗
Rolling deployment across regions
Why it's wrong here
Rolling deployment across regions sequentially updates application instances in one region at a time, shifting traffic away from a region being updated before moving to the next. This approach reduces regional blast radius and provides cross-region availability and failover, making it a correct release strategy for a critical application.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to DevOps and Azure DevOps
Key term
Pipeline
A pipeline is an automated series of steps that takes code from development to production, ensuring quality and speed.
Key term
Environment
An environment is a dedicated set of computing resources, configurations, and services used to develop, test, or host software applications in a controlled and repeatable way.
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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.