My IaC journey to become Hashicorp Terraform Associate certified
Sharing my study journey and all the steps I took to pass the Hashicorp Terraform exam
Hi everyone!! I am glad to share with you that I have been passed on Hashicorp Terraform Associate exam, and I would like to share with you guys, my steps and roadmap have I used to get this approval. First of all, let’s check the oficial Hashicorp Terraform documentation to be aware with the objectives, exam details and prerequisites, it’s very important to know this, before to jump on the my personal steps.
Actually on the IT market and DevOps world, automation is a BIG process to take and follow, mainly if you want to build and provision a highly scale environment, keeping the less human errors and ensure high availability side to side in your application/infrastructure. Based on this, see and practice the Hashicorp Terraform is an amazing way to reinforce your skills to become a DevOps Engineer specialized in IaC solutions.
Let’s check some importants points to be aware about the exam, I will cover most of them from oficial documentation, but is nice if you keep the focus in the Terraform study guide to ensure the objetives and necessary labs. The most of important step is understand the Terraform commands, and practice many of them, all the day while you have been in preparation mode.
Prerequisites
- Basic terminal skills
- Basic understanding of on premises and cloud architecture
Exam Details
- Assessment Type: Multiple choice
- Format: Online proctored
- Duration: 1 hour
- Language: English
- Expiration: 2 years
- Price: $70.50 USD
Exam Objectives
All the necessary objectives is here, from my point of view, I like to list the objectives and keep the notes around this, one by one, you can use GitHub, Trello, Notion or anything else app to do this. Just keep it up and you will have success.
Terraform course
I have watched this course at Udemy, I liked so much because the teacher start with the basics until advanced topics into the Terraform content, main commands, features, state management, providers, functions, arguments and other questions.
Homelabs
Is necessary and so much appreceable you create a #homelab with Terraform, get one provider from your choice and getting start with the provisioning resources, but take care with the values that you are creating on the Cloud provider. Use the AWS free tier payment offering, deploy some EC2, VPC, S3 resources, make sure you have a remote state created, work with variables and functions, it’s very important to practice.
Terraform Practice Exam
If you prefer to follow the Udemy platform, I have used a BIG simulate with almost 300 unique questions to help on the practices of Terraform. Bryan Krausen is a Terraform fanatic, he will ensures that you know all the necessary points to pass on the exam, with creative questions and explanations. There are other two exams practice from Hashicorp documentation, it’s a good idea to check your Terraform skills.
- Sample Questions — Terraform Associate Certification
- Exam Review — Terraform Associate Certification (002)
Medium Articles
There are many Medium articles available to check and read about the Terraform Associate exam, you will see the highlights, questions, tips and materials that envolves Terraform. Start with a simple search and discover more tips to be aware about the exam, I have used a fantastic article covering several commented questions, check the article here.
Study planning
For me, I just have used Notion to keep my notes and any blocks, for example, a topic from the objectives that I am not able to understand or assimilate, for this case, I changed the card to block column and I tried to study more and practice #homelabs until I keep me confort with those topics.
Terraform commands🏗️
Is very important to know all the commands used into the Terraform, be attention on the options and some arguments. To help you I wrote a basic glossary including some relevant commands.
Main commands:
init — Prepare your working directory for other commands
validate — Check whether the configuration is valid
plan — Show changes required by the current configuration
apply — Create or update infrastructure
destroy — Destroy previously-created infrastructure
All other commands:
console — Try Terraform expressions at an interactive command prompt
fmt — Reformat your configuration in the standard style
force-unlock — Release a stuck lock on the current workspace
get — Install or upgrade remote Terraform modules
graph — Generate a Graphviz graph of the steps in an operation
import — Associate existing infrastructure with a Terraform resource
login — Obtain and save credentials for a remote host
logout — Remove locally-stored credentials for a remote host
output — Show output values from your root module
providers — Show the providers required for this configuration
refresh — Update the state to match remote systems
show — Show the current state or a saved plan
state — Advanced state management
taint — Mark a resource instance as not fully functional
test — Experimental support for module integration testing
untaint — Remove the ‘tainted’ state from a resource instance
version — Show the current Terraform version
workspace — Workspace management
YouTube videos
If you are checking the YouTube videos, make sure you have watched the below videos, it’s an amazing way to geting start on the Terraform with #homelabs.
My exam results
I got a BIG approval in the exam, I remember that for some questions I don’t know what I was writing in the moment haha, but one thing was make sense for me, the lessons from Udemy course and YouTube videos, it saved me a lot. 😆
Breakdown by content area:
1.0 Understand infrastructure as code (IaC) concepts: 100%
2.0 Understand Terraform’s purpose (vs other IaC): 50%
3.0 Understand Terraform basics: 100%
4.0 Use the Terraform CLI (outside of core workflow): 100%
5.0 Interact with Terraform modules: 83%
6.0 Navigate Terraform workflow: 83%
7.0 Implement and maintain state: 100%
8.0 Read, generate, and modify configuration: 81%
9.0 Understand Terraform Cloud and Enterprise capabilities: 33%
Good luck and get certified 🚀
That’s all from my side for today, I hope this is pretty much enough for you to pass the exam. There are likely to be an infinite number of optimal strategies to pass the exam. But honestly to possess the hands-on skills, use it for your work and other side projects. I wish you all the very best on the exam.
