DevOps & Cloud
DevOps engineers communicate infrastructure changes, incidents, and cost reports to both technical and non-technical audiences. This path covers writing runbooks, incident reports, deployment announcements, and architecture proposals.
Topics covered
- CI/CD pipelines
- Kubernetes & Docker
- Terraform & IaC
- Cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure)
- Monitoring & alerting
- Blue-green deployments
Vocabulary spotlight
4 terms every DevOps & Cloud should know in English:
blast radius n.
The scope of systems or users that could be impacted if a change fails
"Feature flags let us control the blast radius of this rollout."
toil n.
Repetitive, manual, automatable operational work (SRE concept)
"We spent two weeks automating toil from the on-call rotation."
blue-green deployment n.
A release strategy using two identical environments, switching traffic between them
"Blue-green deployments let us roll back in seconds if something breaks."
immutable infrastructure n.
Servers are never modified in place; instead they are replaced entirely
"Immutable infrastructure means we never SSH in to fix a running box."
📚 Vocabulary Reference
Key terms organised by category for DevOps & Clouds:
CI/CD
Containers & Orchestration
Cloud
Monitoring & Observability
Infrastructure as Code
Recommended exercises
DevOps & Cloud Vocabulary
Vocabulary DevOps Collocations
Vocabulary Incident Response Language
Writing Infrastructure Vocabulary
Vocabulary Writing Post-Mortems & Incident Reports
Writing Reading Kubernetes Error Logs
Reading Writing Technical Documentation & Runbooks
Writing DevOps Engineer Interview Questions
Interview Real-world scenarios you'll practise
- Writing a post-mortem for a production outage
- Explaining a Kubernetes OOMKilled error to developers
- Presenting a cloud cost optimisation plan to management
- Drafting a deployment announcement with rollback criteria
Recommended reading
Reference glossaries for DevOps & Clouds
Deep-dive glossaries covering terminology specific to this role: