Git Rebase vs Merge and AWS RDS Snapshot Restore: Key Differences Explained

A developer training exercise on the KodeKloud Engineer platform covered two practical tasks: rebasing a feature branch onto master without a merge commit, and restoring an AWS RDS instance from a snapshot. Unlike git merge, which joins two histories and records the join, git rebase replays commits one at a time onto the new base, rewriting commit hashes and producing a clean linear history. Because history is rewritten, pushing requires the --force-with-lease flag, though its protection can be bypassed if a background process updates the remote-tracking reference before the push. The AWS portion of the exercise focused on snapshotting an RDS instance and restoring it into a new instance, exploring which configurations carry over automatically and which must be explicitly set. A key takeaway emphasized in Git documentation is that rebasing should only be done on unshared branches, as rewriting shared history forces collaborators to manually reconcile their own work.