My Journey to HashiCorp Certified (003): Terraform Associate
A Complete Guide who wants to take HashiCorp Infrastructure Automation Certification
Terraform is the infrastructure as a Code offering from HashiCorp. It is a tool for building, changing, and managing infrastructure in a safe, repeatable way. Operators and Infrastructure teams can use Terraform to manage environments with a configuration language called the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) for human-readable, automated deployments.
The Terraform Associate certification is for Cloud Engineers specializing in operations, IT, or developers who know the basic concepts and skills associated with open-source HashiCorp Terraform. Candidates will be best prepared for this exam if they have professional experience using Terraform in production, but performing the exam objectives in a personal demo environment may also be sufficient.
Why should you take this exam?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become more popular recently and makes System Operator’s life easier than ever. With IaC, we can create and destroy the whole infrastructure in minutes, you can maintain the versioning as well. It is obvious that the future is multi-cloud to design fault-tolerant and highly available systems and it’s worth investing in this tool to automate the infrastructure provisioning. If you are someone who is developing applications in a multi-cloud environment you will try it.
Planning hacks :
There are no official prerequisites for this exam. However, I would highly recommend the following to be better prepared:
Understanding of at least one public cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, etc.
Basic terminal skills and a basic understanding of On-premises and cloud architecture.
Patience to go over Hashicorp terraform documentation :) https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/certification-003/associate-study-003
Have a completion plan — Set a date to complete this documentation.
Check these https://www.udemy.com/course/terraform-associate-practice-exam/ questions, once you are ready
Check also my GitHub repo(https://github.com/sandhya261996/terraform_project/tree/main/terraform_notes) for better practice its have sets of notes (one detailed one) and one like a cheatsheet, the cheatsheet would be extremely handy to go over before the exams.
About the exam:
This is an online proctored exam with several types of questions such as Multiple Choice, Multiple answers, True or false questions, and text-based questions like fill in the banks. This exam has 57 questions and should be completed in 60 minutes. It is designed to validate the skill set of someone who has some professional experience. The exam costs you $70 and there is no free retake for this exam. You have to complete it successfully in a single take. You get the exam results instantly with the breakdown below and you will receive an email with the same result with the Terraform Certified Associate logo.
Preparation
The following docs helped me to prepare for the exam:
Setting up Terraform locally with an AWS account & experimenting with things
I took around 15 days to prepare (as am relatively new to Terraform), also tried all the exercises from the Udemy course.
Finally, ensure that you register for your exam (see here).
Here are the topics that this exam covers and you can see the full guide here. :
Understand infrastructure as code (IaC) concepts
Understand Terraform’s purpose (vs other IaC)
Understand Terraform basics
Use the Terraform CLI (outside of core workflow)
Interact with Terraform modules
Navigate Terraform workflow
Implement and maintain state
Read, generate, and modify the configuration
Understand Terraform Cloud and Enterprise capabilities
Course content and review
To be honest, terraform documentation is more than enough for this exam. They have a very good Exam study guide and exam review guide. I would suggest you go through these links in order and would highly recommend you practice while going through these materials.
In the fullness of time, I won't go over the details of the course which is covered very well by a lot of other blogs. I would recommend the Udemy course for those folks who are Terraform newbies. I loved learning the Terraform tool via this course.
Useful Tips and Tricks:
Before considering this certification, you should have a basic understanding of at least one public cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. This is because Terraform is all about provisioning infrastructure on the cloud.
If you don’t have hand-on experience with any cloud provider I would highly recommend you go and learn that. Start with AWS if you are new.
You need to understand declarative programming since Terraform uses a declarative approach towards provisioning infrastructure. You need to tell Terraform what your desired infrastructure and Terraform takes care of it.
Don’t just study the documentation if you don't have real-time experience with the Terraform. You can install Terraform on your local machine and start using it and provisioning infrastructure on AWS.Practice. Practice. practice. This helps with your muscle memory.
Understand the importance of IaC and the benefits that Terraform brings to the system operators as well as developers.
Most of the questions are simple enough and you don’t get to see many scenario questions. But, without actual practical hands-on experience, you might get those wrong.
Remember the important file names that we use in the Terraform configuration such as the plugin cache directory, terraform state file name, the default location of the Terraform configuration file, etc.
This exam is very quick and you have to complete 57 questions in 60 minutes. So, practice well enough so that you can answer confidently without thinking much.
Practice more on the terraform workflow (init, plan, and apply) and understand them very well.
Conclusion :
We are moving to a multi-cloud environment and you can’t log in and log out of different cloud providers every time you want to manage resources or you want to have versioning so that you can track. Whatever the reason, Hashicorp Terraform is one of the leading IaC tools its worth investing your time in this.