Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert AZ-400 Practice Question

A ring deployment lets you roll out a release to clearly defined user cohorts (rings), for example employees first, then progressively larger groups of external users. Using Azure Pipelines you can automate separate stages for each ring and gate promotion with metric-based approvals. Weighted routing in Azure Traffic Manager (or Front Door) shifts a configurable percentage of traffic to each ring, enabling the 10 percent ramp in every region. Feature flags or deployment stage gates collect side-by-side telemetry so that business metrics can be compared before traffic is fully diverted. Blue-green swaps cannot target an internal cohort first; they are an all-or-nothing cut-over once validation succeeds. App Service slot A/B testing supports weighted traffic but cannot easily isolate internal users and is limited to a single region. A pure canary via Front Door handles traffic percentages but, without a ring concept, cannot guarantee employees see the build first and lacks built-in metric gates. Therefore a ring deployment with feature flags and weighted routing is the most appropriate choice.