Day 13 of My Cloud Engineering Journey: Learning Git and Source Control Management

Today I spent time learning about Source Control Management (SCM), specifically Git.

This was one of those topics where I had heard the terminology before, but today I started understanding how developers, cloud engineers, and DevOps teams actually use it in the real world.

One of the first things I learned was the difference between Git and GitHub.

Git is the version control system itself. It tracks changes to files and code over time.

GitHub is a platform that hosts Git repositories and allows teams to collaborate on projects remotely.

I also got hands-on practice installing Git on a Linux CentOS system using yum, which helped reinforce some of the Linux skills I've been building over the past few weeks.

After installation, I worked through the basic Git workflow in a lab environment.

I practiced: • initializing a Git repository • configuring files to be tracked • viewing changes • staging changes • committing changes

This helped me understand how Git records snapshots of work over time and provides a history of changes that can be reviewed later.

I also learned about the difference between local and remote repositories.

A local repository exists on your machine, while a remote repository lives on a server such as GitHub or GitLab. Remote repositories allow multiple people to work on the same project while keeping everyone’s work synchronized.

Some additional concepts I practiced included: • setting up remote repositories • pushing changes to a remote server • cloning repositories • pulling updates from remote repositories • understanding collaboration workflows

One thing that stood out to me today is how important source control is to modern development and cloud environments.

Without source control, teams would have no reliable way to track changes, review work, collaborate safely, or recover from mistakes.

The more I learn, the more I see how everything connects together.

Linux, networking, applications, Python, Terraform, DevOps, and now Git all seem to build upon one another.

Tomorrow I’ll be learning about web servers and continuing to expand my understanding of how applications are delivered to end users.