Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert AZ-400 Practice Question

Scalar installs a service that automatically configures Git partial clone and sparse-checkout (cone mode). With partial clone, only the metadata and tree objects are downloaded initially; file contents (blobs) are fetched on demand, reducing the size and duration of clone and fetch operations. Sparse-checkout further limits the working directory to the paths a developer needs. The server continues to store full history, so no history rewrite or repository migration is required.

A history rewrite with git filter-repo could shrink the repo, but it breaks commit hashes and forces every consumer (including CI pipelines) to migrate, which contradicts the requirement to avoid rewriting history. Switching to TFVC is a migration to a different version-control system rather than an optimization of the existing Git repository. Enabling Git LFS for every file larger than 1 MB would create thousands of pointers and still require an extensive migration; LFS improves binary handling but would not significantly reduce metadata or tree sizes that dominate clone and fetch times for very large repositories.