5 exercises — the specific verb choices in DevOps and cloud operations are not interchangeable. Native English speakers consistently choose one verb over others that seem equally logical.
Key verb–noun pairs in this set
spin up an environment — start a new container/VM/instance
trigger a rollback — not "do" or "make"
tear down an environment — complete permanent removal
scale out — add more instances (horizontal); scale up = bigger instance (vertical)
trigger / run / build a pipeline — but never "solve a pipeline"
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A DevOps engineer says: "Give me two minutes, I need to ___ a fresh environment for the demo." Which verb phrase is the most natural DevOps collocation for starting a new containerised environment?
Spin up is the idiomatic DevOps verb phrase for starting a new container, VM, instance, or cloud environment. It is the most natural and widely-used term in container and cloud operations. You will hear it constantly: "spin up a container", "spin up a new EC2 instance", "spin up a staging environment", "how long does it take to spin up?". Its opposite is spin down (shut down, deallocate) or tear down (destroy completely — see exercise 3). "Start up" is intelligible but less idiomatic in this context. "Boot up" is used for physical machines or VMs, not containers. "Build up" is not used in this sense. Note: "spin up" can also mean starting an entirely new service or team ("we're spinning up a new platform team").
2 / 5
An on-call engineer writes in the incident Slack channel: "We need to ___ a rollback immediately — the new build is causing 500s on checkout." Which verb is most natural and idiomatic in this context?
Trigger a rollback is the most idiomatic choice in a fast-moving incident context. "Trigger" conveys that the rollback is an immediate, reactive action — often automated or one-click. It collocates naturally with events and processes that are initiated quickly: trigger a deployment, trigger an alert, trigger a pipeline. Other natural options: "perform a rollback" is correct and professional, often used in runbooks and post-mortems. "initiate a rollback" is formal and used in documentation. "Do a rollback" is casual but acceptable in spoken English. "Make a rollback" and "create a rollback" are unnatural — native DevOps speakers do not use these. Learn the set: trigger / perform / initiate / execute a rollback.
3 / 5
After a sprint demo, the team wants to remove the temporary cloud environment they provisioned. Which sentence uses the most natural DevOps collocation?
Tear down is the standard term for permanently destroying and removing a provisioned environment, infrastructure stack, or set of cloud resources. It implies complete removal, not just stopping. You will see it heavily in IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tooling: terraform destroy is sometimes called "tearing down the stack". Common usage: "tear down the demo env", "run the teardown script", "a teardown pipeline that runs after PR close". The others: "spin down" = stop/deallocate a running resource, but it remains recoverable — the opposite of "spin up". Not used for complete deletion. "clean up" = remove leftover files, temp data, cached artifacts — it implies tidying, not destroying infrastructure. "break down" is not used in DevOps — it means malfunction or disassemble in other contexts.
4 / 5
The platform team is implementing autoscaling. Their architecture doc states: "As request traffic grows, the service will automatically ___ by adding new instances across availability zones." Which collocation correctly describes horizontal scaling?
Scale out (also called horizontal scaling) means adding more instances/nodes/pods to distribute load — rather than making a single instance bigger. This is the preferred scaling strategy for cloud-native and microservices architectures because it improves both capacity and fault tolerance. Contrast with scale up (vertical scaling) = making the existing instance larger (more CPU, RAM). Key difference: scale out = more machines; scale up = bigger machine. DevOps example: "The Kubernetes HPA will scale out from 3 to 10 replicas under load." Collocate: scale out the service, scale out to N replicas, the cluster scales out automatically. "Expand out" and "grow out" are not used in English DevOps/cloud vocabulary.
5 / 5
In CI/CD vocabulary, which verb does NOT naturally collocate with "pipeline"?
"Solve a pipeline" is not a natural English collocation — you do not solve a pipeline. The natural verbs that collocate with "pipeline" are: trigger (trigger the CI pipeline when a PR opens), run (run the full pipeline before deploy), build (build a deployment pipeline in GitHub Actions), configure (configure the pipeline), fix (the pipeline is broken — fix it), monitor, fail (the pipeline failed at the test stage). You solve problems, not pipelines. If a pipeline is failing, you fix it, debug it, or investigate why it failed. Common CI/CD verb-noun collocations to know: trigger a build, run the tests, deploy to staging, promote to production, roll back a release.