5 collocation exercises on the verbs DevOps engineers use daily — spinning up environments, tearing down stacks, scaling out, rolling back.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A DevOps engineer says: "Give me two minutes, I need to ___ a fresh environment." Which verb is the natural collocation?
Spin up is the idiomatic DevOps verb for starting a container, VM, or cloud environment from scratch.
spin up an environment / a server / a container — provision and start it
The opposite is tear down, not "spin down" (though that exists for scaling)
"Boot up" applies to a single machine's OS; "build up" and "start up" are not the standard cloud collocations. You'll hear: "I'll spin up a staging box and ping you."
2 / 5
After the demo, the team wants to remove the temporary stack completely. They ___ the environment.
Tear down means to destroy/de-provision infrastructure you no longer need.
tear down a stack / an environment — the natural opposite of spin up
In tools like Terraform this maps to destroy
"Shut down" stops a machine but keeps it; "tear down" removes it entirely. Example: "Don't forget to tear down the test cluster — it's burning money."
3 / 5
Traffic is rising. To add more identical instances behind the load balancer, you ___.
Scale out means adding more instances/nodes (horizontal scaling).
scale out — add more machines
scale up — make a single machine bigger (more CPU/RAM, vertical)
scale in — remove instances
So "scale out/in" is horizontal and "scale up/down" is vertical. Example: "Under Black Friday load we scale out to forty pods."
4 / 5
The new feature is ready for users. The team is going to ___ it to production gradually.
Roll out means to release/deploy something progressively to users.
roll out a feature / a release / an update — deploy it, often in stages
Often paired with a gradual / phased / canary rollout
The opposite when something breaks is roll back. Example: "We'll roll out the redesign to 5% of users first."
5 / 5
The deploy broke checkout. The on-call engineer immediately decides to ___ to the previous version.
Roll back means reverting a deployment to the last known-good version.
roll back a deploy / a release / a migration — undo it
The opposite of roll out
"Fall back" is more about a backup mechanism, not undoing a release. Example: "Error rate spiked, so we rolled back within ninety seconds."