I needed a structured approach to multi-cloud thinking after years of single-cloud deployments. The vendor-powered labs made the difference—trade-offs between Terraform and CloudFormation finally made sense—and the 12-month cadence suited my release cycles. It is basically what we currently run in staging; my capstone stitched Git + Jenkins with Canary releases and simple Prometheus/Grafana alerts. The faculty prioritized architecture over automation rather than promoting tools for their own sake. I had fewer “it works on dev” surprises and cleaner runbooks when I left.