HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

Background

HashiCorp offers a certification for those wanting to benchmark their Terraform knowledge. The certification covers a wide range of topics. The topics include:

• Definition of Infrastructure as Code
• Terraform’s Purpose
• Terraform Basics
• Terraform CLI
• Modules
• State
• Cloud and Enterprises capabilities.

The exam is offered by PSI for those wanting to take the exam remotely and you must have a GitHub account to take the exam. It’s around 60 questions and you have an hour to finish the exam.

I’ll attempt to give a high overview on where I felt is worth studying to assist others who might be looking at taking this exam.

Study Guide Outline

• Terraform type:
  • Casting
  • What is required to define a variable:
• Terraform taint
  • What it does
  • When it’s used
• Terraform state
  • What happens a state file is directly changed
  • What happens to state if a resource is deleted from within the cloud provider’s portal
  • What happens if resources are updated outside of the state file
  • Default behavior when creating a state file
• Reference properties
  • How to reference items in a for_each block
  • Reference individual properties of additional resources
• Local Modules
  • What limitations there might be
• Terraform State commands
  • list
  • mv
  • show
• terraform fmt
• IaC best practices
  • Why?
  • What benefits are there?
• Remote state
  • Requirements
  • How terraform init interacts with this?
  • Where can remote state be stored?
• How is a plan stored?
• terraform init
  • Functionality
  • What is the output and where is it stored
• local_exec
  • What it is?
  • What it does?
  • How to use it?
  • When to use it?
• Versioning syntax
  • = vs ~> vs >
• Modules
  • When to use them?
  • How to pass variables to them?
  • What functionality is available to them?
• Terraform Cloud and Enterprise
  • What is it?
  • What is Sentinel?
    • Who can use it?
    • When is it ran?
  • Workspaces
    • What are they?
    • When to use them?

Conclusion

This wasn’t an overly difficult exam. For background I’ve been working in Terraform part time for about 8 months and didn’t find this exam overly difficult. The hardest part for me was understanding the Terraform Cloud and Enterprise pieces of it as it’s something I have never actively worked on and definitely worth learning what is out there.