AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement build and release pipelines
Your organization uses GitHub Actions for CI/CD. You need to implement a deployment strategy where a new version of the application is gradually shifted from the stable environment to a canary environment, and if health checks pass, the traffic is fully shifted to the canary. Which GitHub Actions deployment strategy should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse canary deployment with blue-green deployment, assuming both involve a full cutover, but canary specifically requires gradual traffic shifting with health-check validation before full promotion.
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
A canary deployment gradually shifts traffic from the stable environment to a new canary environment, using health checks to validate the new version before fully routing all traffic to it. This matches the requirement of a gradual shift with health-check gating. GitHub Actions supports this via deployment strategies like `canary` in environments or custom workflows with traffic-splitting tools.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Recreate deployment
Why it's wrong here
Recreate deployment is incorrect because it first tears down the old version entirely and then provisions the new version, resulting in a hard cutover with no overlap between the two releases. Users experience full downtime during the redeployment window, and the new version receives 100 percent of traffic immediately after it is created. There is no gradual traffic shift, no health-check-based promotion, and no limited-blast-radius check, so a defect in the new version impacts every user at once.
- ✓
Canary deployment
Why this is correct
Canary deployment is correct because it gradually shifts traffic to the new version, starting with a small percentage, and promotes it only if health checks and key metrics pass. If the health checks fail partway through, the rollout can be halted or rolled back, and only the small canary slice of users has been exposed to the problematic version. This satisfies the requirement for a gradual, safer release with a limited blast radius and controlled promotion.
- ✗
Blue-green deployment
Why it's wrong here
Blue-green deployment is incorrect because it runs two identical environments side by side and performs an atomic, all-at-once cutover from the old version to the new version via a load balancer or DNS switch. There is no gradual shifting of user traffic, and no health-check-gated promotion that exposes only a small percentage to the new code. If the new environment misbehaves after the switch, the entire user base is immediately affected, so it does not satisfy a gradual canary-style rollout.
- ✗
Rolling deployment
Why it's wrong here
Rolling deployment is incorrect because it progressively replaces instances in the existing environment, batch by batch, while keeping the overall service available. Although it may pause or roll back if instance health checks fail, it does not use percentage-based traffic shifting to direct a small, controlled slice of real user traffic to the new version for validation. The load balancer routes normal traffic across whatever instances exist, so the new version is never isolated to a small canary group; failures can affect a broader set of users as the rollout proceeds.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Source Control Strategy Design
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.
Key term
Check
A Check in Azure DevOps is a gating mechanism that evaluates predefined conditions before allowing a pipeline deployment to proceed to a specific environment.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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