My Journey of HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate & Tips
5 min readJun 10, 2020
In this week only I have earned my HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate Exam. This is pretty special for me because I got 95%, which is second highest score of my all the other exams till now. One more special thing for this exam is I haven’t gone through any video tutorial or other study material for this exam, just gone through the Terraform Documentations, which are doing their work pretty well.
I am having some experience with Terraform which turned out really helpful while attempting the exam.
Exam Pattern & Questions
- Exam is 1 hour long and we get 57 MCQ/MAQ/Fill in the Blanks/True&False questions to answer in that duration. If we see this number it seems, it is a too much questions but these are not, you will be able to attempt all of them in time.
- You can register exam for USD $70.50. In India when I scheduled the exam it was around USD $84.
- All questions covers conceptual questions, troubleshooting and about feature/functions provided by Terraform. These questions cover almost everything which is there in Terraform.
- You won’t be allowed to connect any external webpage, only webpage where your exam is scheduled will be accessible.
- Make sure, you have done your system check for the exam, you can find these steps Here.
- You can start exam in window of 15 minutes before and after. You will get launch exam link Here.
- You can cancel and rescheduled the exam even before exam from here. There is no penalty for rescheduling the exam before it begins.
- If your organisation is partner with HashiCorp then you can get Free vouchers/discount codes. Please contact the respective person in your office for that.
- Proctor will join you via a zoom meeting, so before going into the exam make sure everything is working fine with zoom. You can test it with setting up on your and any of your friend’s machine and then check if audio/video/recording is working fine as well as permissions are sorted for zoom.
- When you finish the exam, Exam score will be there right on your screen just after that, so no waiting time.
Writing in Exam
- Read it very carefully and try to understand the question. In some questions it was really hard to check what question is actually asking and it moulds the question in a way that you can get confused very easily.
- Check carefully, if question is having not in the statement, because that single word can make you select the wrong answer.
- Timer will be there just above the questions so you can easily check how much time is remaining.
- If you think the question is taking more time to understand or getting confused, mark it as flag and later come back once you are done with all the questions.
- You can see all the questions in bottom right corner. You can directly go to any question you want from there. You can also see which question is flagged by you over there.
- Some question will appear like very easy, be more precautious about those because we usually do mistakes in those kind of questions.
Resources to Study
- I have completely followed only the docs from Here. Go in deep of every link provided on this Page.
- You can write some small Piece of Codes for the testing. This will give you a better understanding of concepts and you can easily be able to remember them in the exam.
- There is no need to read for every public cloud(AWS, GCP, Azure) for this exam. You can pick any one of them in which you comfortable and can read about the concepts and features what terraform is providing to us.
- Once you are done with the above Link, then you can check if you are good with everything from Here.
- Once you think you are good then you can see some sample questions from Here.
- For practice test, you can refer to this as well. I have given both the tests. Second test is not that relative to the exam but yeah that motivates you to go through again a lot of things.
Tips
- Make sure before going into the exam you are properly rested. In this paper you have to choose questions very fast and if you feel any dizziness then you can make questions wrong even after knowing the right answer.
- Difference between Open source, Terraform Cloud and Enterprise should be understood really very well. Whatever features they are providing, read about them as well, you can have question from there as well.
- What are different signs while restricting to the providers version? For example meaning of >, <, >=, <=, ~>(this is the most important one).
- What terraform and providers blocks do, what are the differences in them?
- How can we use multiple provider in a single configuration page?
- What are features of IaC and how it is helping current organisations to manage their large infrastructure?
- How the module works, how to write modules in module registry, how to use them in configurations, what kind of module repositories we are having, how module helps ? Make sure your concepts are very clear about modules in Terraform.
- Learn about the commands very well. You should know, how the commands are working and why and where should we use them? Please check these commands plan, apply, destroy, taint, fmt, init, state, workspace, import, validate.
- Go through the functions and try to use some of them. You should know about the common functions, what they do and for which data type they are being used. You can check these from here.
- Check how the logging works, and how can you setup verbose logging. which variable is being used for that and what are the available options for that?
- How dynamic block is being used? how the loop works?
- How workspace works differently in Open Source and Enterprise?
- Concepts around the state file, locking/unlocking, remote storage, security etc.
- Sentinel Policy Overview. why/where/how can it be used?
- Terraform Backend Types. Use cases of them. Which can have state lock feature and which can not?
I have tried to cover almost every aspect of the exam here, still there are chances I have missed something, please let me know if forgot to add anything or can add something. Your suggestions are always welcome and I will try to improve them.
If you like this, please give clap/s for me, it really motivates me to write more useful things.
If you have anything in your mind and want me to write about that then also you can suggest me. My LinkedIn profile in the bio, you can connect with me from there.
Thank you very much for reading this.
Happy Learning !!! 🙂 📚
