AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement build and release pipelines
You need to deploy a web app to Azure App Service using Azure Pipelines. The deployment slot should be 'staging' first, and after smoke tests, swap to production. Which deployment strategy should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is that 'slot swap' is an Azure-specific implementation mechanism, not the deployment strategy. Candidates may answer 'slot swap' because they recognize the step, but the question asks for the strategy, which is blue-green.
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
Blue-green deployment is a release strategy that uses two identical environments (blue and green). The new version is deployed to the staging slot (green), smoke tests are run, and traffic is switched to the staging slot by swapping it with the production slot (blue). Slot swap is the Azure App Service mechanism used to implement blue-green deployment, but the strategy itself is blue-green.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Slot swap
Why it's wrong here
Azure App Service deployment slots are separate live environments with their own hostnames; deploying to a staging slot and then performing a swap seamlessly shifts production traffic to the staged app, with built-in warm-up and automated configuration/connection-string switching, making it the standard zero-downtime deployment method for App Service.
- ✗
Canary deployment
Why it's wrong here
Canary deployment gradually routes a small percentage of live traffic to a new version before increasing the share, typically using traffic-weight routing or feature flags; while App Service supports slot swapping with traffic percentages, the question's requirement to deploy via App Service slots specifically points to a full slot swap, not a partial canary rollout.
- ✗
Rolling update
Why it's wrong here
A rolling update replaces instances incrementally across the same environment, avoiding downtime but not leveraging App Service's native slot-based staging and swap mechanism; it would require manual orchestration or CI/CD tasks that update deployment slots rather than the slot-swap feature, so it is not the slot-based deployment being asked for.
- ✓
Blue-green deployment
Why this is correct
Blue-green deployment maintains two fully separate environments (blue and green) with the new version deployed to the idle environment before switching traffic via a load balancer or DNS; although conceptually similar, App Service slots provide this capability within a single app as a swap, so slot swap is the precise Azure-native implementation, not a distinct blue-green setup.
Visual reference
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to DevOps and Azure DevOps
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
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.
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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.