Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert AZ-400 Practice Question

Your organization uses Azure Pipelines to deploy an ASP.NET Core application. Compliance rules require that any pipeline run that successfully deploys to the Prod environment must keep all build artifacts, logs, and test results for at least five years. All other runs can follow the default 30-day project retention policy. The multi-stage deployment pipeline is defined in YAML and must remain self-service for developers. You need an automated solution that meets the compliance requirement while minimizing storage costs for non-production runs. What should you recommend?

Define a retention policy in the pipeline's YAML that sets daysToKeep to 1,825 for all runs.
Create an Azure Artifacts feed with a 1,825-day retention policy and publish all build outputs as packages to that feed.
Set the project-level pipeline retention policy to 1,825 days.
Add a job in the production stage that invokes the Azure DevOps REST API to create a retention lease on the current run after a successful deployment.

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Answer Description

A project- or pipeline-wide retention period would keep every run for five years, dramatically increasing storage consumption. Azure Artifacts retention policies cover only packages and do not preserve the entire pipeline run's logs or test results. Instead, the production stage can include a lightweight script or task that calls the Azure DevOps REST API to set the keepForever property to true for the current run. This action creates a retention lease that overrides normal cleanup policies, keeping the specific run and all of its artifacts indefinitely, while other runs continue to be deleted after 30 days.

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