AZ-400 Prerequisites: What You Actually Need Before the DevOps Expert Exam

There is no prerequisite to sit the AZ-400 exam itself: anyone can book it. But passing it earns you nothing on its own. The Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert certification is only issued once you hold AZ-400 plus at least one qualifying associate certification: Azure Administrator Associate (via Exam AZ-104) or Azure Developer Associate (via Exam AZ-204). And that second path is closing: Exam AZ-204 retires on July 31, 2026.

That one paragraph answers the question most people type. The rest of this article covers the details that actually change your study plan: which prerequisite path to pick in 2026, what experience the exam assumes beyond the paper requirements, and how the July 27, 2026 outline refresh affects the timing.

The certification requirement, straight from the certification page

Microsoft's DevOps Engineer Expert page states it plainly: to become certified, you must earn at least one of Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate or Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate. AZ-400 is the required exam on top. The order does not matter. You can pass AZ-400 first and the associate exam later; the Expert badge appears when both are in your transcript.

People fail to plan for this constantly. They spend three months preparing for AZ-400, pass it, and then discover the certification will not issue because they never sat an associate exam. If you hold neither associate certification today, budget for two exams, not one.

AZ-104 or AZ-204: which prerequisite path in 2026

Until this summer there were two genuinely open routes. That changes on July 31, 2026, when Microsoft retires Exam AZ-204. Here is the comparison as it stands:

If you already hold the Azure Developer Associate certification, you still qualify; retirement removes the exam, not the credential you earned. But if you are starting from zero this summer, the realistic route is the AZ-104 practice test path, and our AZ-204 page documents the retirement timeline if you want to see how close the window is.

The experience prerequisites nobody grades but the exam enforces

The AZ-400 audience profile is specific: you are a developer or infrastructure administrator with expertise in people, processes and products for continuous delivery, and you must have experience with both GitHub and Azure DevOps. That second clause is the one that fails experienced engineers. The outline pairs the two platforms on objective after objective: GitHub Packages next to Azure Artifacts, GitHub Actions next to Azure Pipelines, GITHUB_TOKEN next to service connections, GitHub Advanced Security in both its GitHub and Azure DevOps variants.

In the roughly 2,000-word study guide, GitHub appears 23 times and Azure DevOps 11. If your career has lived entirely in one platform, treat the other as a real prerequisite even though no exam enforces it. The GitHub Actions certification practice exam page maps the Actions blueprint that AZ-400 samples from, and drilling it doubles as prep for GitHub's own GH-200 exam.

The knowledge prerequisite: pipelines, half the exam

One more number belongs in any honest prerequisites discussion: design and implement build and release pipelines is 50 to 55 percent of AZ-400. No other current Microsoft role-based exam concentrates half its marks in a single domain. Before booking, you should be comfortable designing package versioning strategies (SemVer and CalVer), writing YAML pipelines with reusable templates and variable groups, choosing between blue-green, canary and ring deployments, implementing IaC with Bicep, and optimizing pipeline concurrency and cost. That last one is a named objective: the exam expects you to treat pipeline spend as an engineering input, the same discipline teams apply when they track what their cloud spend actually does across environments.

If most of that list reads as familiar work, AZ-400 is your exam. If half of it is new, spend time in the associate material first; that is what the prerequisite structure is for.

Do the AZ-400 and AZ-104 certifications expire?

Yes, and this belongs in any prerequisites plan because it compounds. Microsoft associate and expert certifications expire annually. Renewal is free: you pass an online, unproctored assessment on Microsoft Learn, available in the six months before the expiry date. But note what stacking means here. Once you hold DevOps Engineer Expert, you are maintaining two credentials: the Expert badge and the associate underneath it. Miss the associate renewal and the Expert certification loses its foundation. Set both renewal windows in your calendar the day the badges issue; the assessments are short, but forgotten renewals are the most common way engineers quietly lose an expert credential they spent a year earning.

How much does AZ-400 cost?

Microsoft displays exam pricing by country at scheduling time, and it is not printed on the study guide, so treat any fixed number you read on a prep site as potentially stale. Budget for two exams if you hold no associate certification (your AZ-104 or AZ-204 sitting plus AZ-400), plus a retake buffer if your practice scores sit near the line. What is published and stable: the passing score, 700, and the existence of a free official practice assessment for both AZ-400 and AZ-104 on Microsoft Learn, which means calibration costs you nothing.

Does the July 27, 2026 refresh change the prerequisites?

No. The refreshed skills outline that takes effect July 27, 2026 changes wording inside a few objectives (the official change log grades every edit Minor or No change), and it does not touch the certification requirements. The five domains and their weights are identical on both sides of the date. The only timing note worth making: the AZ-204 retirement lands four days after the AZ-400 refresh, so late July 2026 is the busiest week this certification track has had in years. Book around it.

How to prepare once the prerequisites are sorted

The sequence that works: earn or confirm your associate certification, then study AZ-400 to the weights. Half of every study session should be pipelines. Upload your notes or the official study guide to the AZ-400 practice test generator and build question sets domain by domain, then finish with Microsoft's free official practice assessment on Learn before booking. The passing score is published, 700, and the official mock is the best calibration you can get for it.

AZ-400 prerequisites, in one table

Prerequisites sorted, the exam itself is beatable with weighted practice. Start where the marks are.

A final sanity check before you book anything: read the current study guide yourself on Microsoft Learn rather than trusting a course platform's summary of it. The guide prints both versions of the skills measured around the July 27 cutover, names every objective verbatim, and takes fifteen minutes to read. Most expensive AZ-400 surprises trace back to skipping that step.