AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement build and release pipelines
Your team is adopting Azure Pipelines for a new project. You need to ensure that only authorized users can approve releases to production. Which two methods can you use to implement approval checks?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse 'Deployment Gates' (which are automated health evaluation checks) with 'Approval Checks' (which are manual sign-offs), leading candidates to incorrectly select Option B as a valid method for approval checks.
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
✓
Configure pre-deployment approvals on the Production environment.
Pre-deployment approvals on the Production environment (Option A) allow you to require one or more users or groups to approve a release before it is deployed to that environment. Similarly, setting the 'Required approvers' field on the environment (Option C) specifies the users or groups that must approve the deployment, which is another native Azure Pipelines approval mechanism. Both enforce authorization at the environment level, ensuring only designated approvers can promote a release to production.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure pre-deployment approvals on the Production environment.
Why this is correct
In Azure Pipelines, pre-deployment approvals on an environment require designated approvers to manually approve before any release deployment to that environment, providing a controlled go/no-go checkpoint. This is the standard mechanism for enforcing manual sign-off on production deployments, unlike automated gates.
- ✗
Use Deployment Gates with a manual approval gate.
Why it's wrong here
Deployment gates in Azure Pipelines are automated health checks that evaluate conditions (e.g., work items, build quality, incident alerts) before or after deployment; they do not support a manual approval gate. Manual approval must be configured separately via pre-deployment approvals or environment approval checks.
- ✓
Set the 'Required approvers' field on the environment to a specific user or group.
Why this is correct
Setting the 'Required approvers' field on an environment specifies which users or groups must approve a deployment to that environment. This is equivalent to an environment approval check; it requires explicit manual approval before the deployment proceeds, and can be combined with gates.
- ✗
Add a Manual Intervention task in the release pipeline.
Why it's wrong here
A Manual Intervention task pauses the execution of the pipeline at a specific point and allows an operator to resume or reject, but it is a task inside the release, not an environment-level approval mechanism. Unlike environment approvals, it doesn't provide pre-deployment authorization tied to the environment; it's less flexible and doesn't integrate with approval policies.
- ✗
Add an Approval Check to the agent pool.
Why it's wrong here
Approval checks in Azure Pipelines can be attached to environments, repositories, or service connections, but they are not a supported check type for agent pools. Agent pools are infrastructure resources for running jobs; they cannot have approval checks, and adding one would not govern deployments to Production.
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to DevOps and Azure DevOps
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
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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