My Experience on HashiCorp Certified — Terraform Associate Exam

5 min readJul 29, 2020

Recently, I have the opportunity to take the Terraform Associate Exam by HashiCorp after getting a free exam voucher from GDG-Cloud-Nuremberg Community [THANKS :-)]. Don’t be sad, you can also get FREE vouchers/discount code if your company is partnered with HashiCorp.

Terraform Associate Exam Details

The exam itself is a combination of true/false, multiple-choice, multiple-answer and fill-in-the-blank with 57 questions for 60 mins. It is not as deep as a hands-on exam rather than verify basic infrastructure automation skills and understand which features exist in Terraform enterprise and what you can/can’t do using the terraform open source offering. In summary, here are the exam details and 9 high-level exam objectives by HashiCorp:-

Product Version Tested: Terraform 0.12 and higher

Terraform Associate Exam High-Level Objectives

Still, now HashiCorp is not publishing any passing score threshold, but if you manage 70% marks hopefully, you will pass the exam. Just like any present-time exam, you get the results immediately after taking the exam. However, it will take 10 days(max) to receive the digital badge.
Here is a sample exam report.

HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate Exam Report

You can cancel/reschedule the exam at any time before 15 minutes of the exam starts. You can also reach out to The HashiCorp Product Certifications Team (certifications@hashicorp.com) If you have any query/issue about the exam/schedule.

How did I prepare

I had 6 months of prior Terraform experience before seating for this exam. I read only their official Exam Review guide, 250-practice-questions and Udemy practice exam by Bryan Krausen, practice exam by CloudME (Thanks Cognizant for Udemy Business Account :-) ). I believe the exam is easy to pass if you possess Terraform basic understanding, purpose, workflow, functions modules, workspace concepts.
However, if you never used Terraform before I will suggest the following

Enrol this Udemy course HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate 2020 by Zeal Vora.
Thoroughly review HashiCorp Study Guide for Terraform Associate Certification. This guide lists resources to prepare for the exam from scratch.
Once you finish the Terraform Study Guide, then review the Exam Review Guide related to 9 particular exam objectives.
Finally, do the practice which I mentioned before.

HashiCorp on-demand Workshops

Below are some useful links and details of HashiCorp on-demand training workshops for Terraform 101 & 102.

Few tips regarding the exam

I just like to share very high-level tips based on my personal experience, but there is no replacement of HashiCorp study and exam review guide to passing the exam.

Tip#1: Read the question carefully

Don’t jump to answer quickly without reading the question/options properly.
Example:
Read the question attentively, whether it ask the benefits of IaC or Terraform. Versioning, Reusability of the Code, Automation are the common benefits of IaC.

Tip#2: Learn Basic Terraform commands and workflow

It's very important to know the basic terraform commands and workflow like init, refresh, fmt, plan, apply, taint, workspace, destroy, state, show, import and their possible options. Also important to learn about the terraform provider and provisioners. At least, you will get 30% questions related to directly or indirectly with this.
Example:
- How do you inspect the current state of the infrastructure applied?
Ans:- terraform show
- If a resource mark as “tainted”, what will happen when you run the “terraform plan” next time?
Ans:- Terraform will remove the tainted resource and recreate the resource again.
- Which condition is useful for terraform remote provision?
Ans:- running script to the remote instance

Tip#3: Imp to understand tfstate file, possible backends and debugging.

“State” is a necessary requirement for Terraform to function and “backend” in terraform determines how the state is loaded and operate. The exam will heavily test your understanding of this along with the debugging setup.
Example:
- True/false, Consul backend supports state locking
Ans: True
- What is the default backend for Terraform?
Ans: Local
- How to specify where the log should persist its output to.
Ans: TF_LOG_PATH

Tip#4: Implicit vs Explicit dependencies

Understand dependency information to determine the correct order to create different resources and how to “explicitly” declare resource dependency.
Example:
- which terraform argument you can use to handle hidden resource dependencies that terraform can’t automatically infer.
Ans:- depends_on

Tip#5: Module, Workspace and Registry

Theses 3 topics are very vital and you will get at least 20% from it. It is also important to understand a workspace difference for open source and enterprise version.
Example:
- For local state, the workspaces are stored directly in
Ans:- directory called terraform.tfstate.d
- Terraform Cloud workspaces and local working directories serve the same purpose, but they store their data differently
Ans:- True
- How to search module in the terraform public registry
Ans:- browse by Providers, browse by Modules

Tip#6: Terraform Cloud vs Enterprise feature and offerings

You will get at least 2/3 questions related to this including the “Sentinel” policy feature.

Tip#7: Type correct answer in the box

There will be at least 1–3 questions, where you need to type the answer into a box. So don’t get surprised.
Example:-
Terraform command _______ automatically updates configurations in the current directory for easy readability and consistency.
Ans:- terraform fmt

Tip#8: Don’t get stuck

Honestly, 60 mins are good enough to complete the exam comfortably. However, don’t stick to a single question for a long time. There is an option “Highlight” in the exam, which you can use to flag a question and come back later.

All the Best

Finally, I wish you all the best on the exam and achieve the Terraform Associate Certification. You can reach me on LinkedIn for any further query, happy to help. Good Luck :-)