Short answer: Git is a program on your computer that records the history of your files. GitHub is a website that stores copies of Git repositories so people can share them and work together. You can use Git with no GitHub account; you cannot use GitHub without Git.
Short answer: MLOps is the practice of getting machine learning models into production and keeping them useful there — versioning data and models, making training reproducible, automating deployment, and monitoring for the drift that quietly degrades every model. It is DevOps plus two things software does not have: data as a dependency, and silent failure.
Short answer: learn Terraform first. It is the most requested infrastructure-as-code skill in job postings, it works across clouds, and its concepts transfer everywhere. Use CloudFormation when you are all-in on AWS and want no state file to manage. Use the CDK when your team would rather write TypeScript or Python than a configuration language.
Short answer: two to four weeks for the basics, three to six months to build real things, and four to twelve months to be job-ready — driven almost entirely by hours per week. Five hours weekly puts job readiness around a year; fifteen to twenty pulls it to four or six months.
Short answer: use RAG when the answer depends on facts that change, or when you need citations. Fine-tune when the problem is behaviour — a fixed format, a specific tone, or a small model that must match a large one on one narrow task. Around 80 percent of applications start with RAG, and most mature systems end up with both.
Short answer: a CI/CD pipeline is an automated sequence that runs every time someone pushes code — it builds the application, runs the tests, packages it, and deploys it. Continuous integration is the build-and-test half; continuous delivery keeps a deployable artefact ready; continuous deployment releases it automatically.
Short answer: if you already work in IT, start with the Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03). It costs 150 US dollars, takes six to ten weeks of study, and appears in more job postings than any other AWS credential. Take the Cloud Practitioner first only if you are completely new to technology.
Short answer: they are not alternatives. Docker builds and runs a container; Kubernetes runs many containers across many machines and keeps them alive. You need Docker from day one. You need Kubernetes when one server is no longer enough, or when the cost of an outage exceeds the cost of a cluster — and not before.
Short answer: most people reach junior DevOps level in 8 to 14 months. Learn in this order: Linux, networking, Git, one cloud, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform. Employers hire on demonstrated work, not certificates — three real projects beat five exams. No computer science degree is required.
After months of building hands-on courses, we opened a complementary space: a blog for the questions that are too specific for a course chapter and too important to leave unanswered.