Study And Pass The Terraform Associate Certification

My experience studying for and then taking the Terraform Certified Associate exam in two weeks.

Study Materials

A Cloud Guru — HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate Course

A Cloud Guru’s Certified Terraform Associate course has what you need to get up to speed on the Terraform basics. The course takes you from the basics of Terraform like creating resources and using variables; To an in-depth dive into using Providers, Provisioners, Modules and Terraform state. The course then finishes by showcasing and comparing HashiCorp’s Enterprise offering to its open source offering.

Additionally, the subscription includes hands-on labs that allow you to utilise Terraform and AWS’ offerings in a risk-free environment.

For those looking for a flexible approach to studying. The source code for the course has been made available on GitHub. The repository also serves as a good reference for future Terraform work.

Terraforms Documentation

HashiCorp has provided extensive (human-readable) documentation, reference guides and practice exams on the Terraforms Website. For anyone who is not willing to purchase the course; the resources provided by Terraform are sufficient to prepare you for the exam.

I think the practice exams, study guide and reference documentation would be beneficial for anyone attempting the exam.

Exam Review

Tips

• Be familiar with the Terraform CLI commands, what ones are real and what parameters they take
• Be familiar with how Terraform variables work from Outputs, Modules and Resources
• Be familiar with the different variable types in Terraform and when best to apply them
• Understand Terraform’s purpose and the purpose of Infrastructure as Code
• Understand the HashiCorp Enterprise offerings
• Understand how Terraform State works and how Terraform behaves when resources are created, destroyed and modified outside of its state

Format

The exam is 60 questions made up of multiple choice (single and multiple answers) and fill-in-the-blank questions; participants are given a total of 60 minutes to complete the exam.

I found the allocated time to be generous in that I had time to go through every question and then loop over the exam to cross-check all my answers; with 25–30 minutes to spare. The questions are a few sentences long and are easily comprehensible.

Summary

Overall, I would say this is a valuable certification to get under your belt. Whether you plan on working in the infrastructure space or are a developer wishing to become more well-rounded and practice the DevOps mindset. The certification’s value with a relatively small study load provides sufficient knowledge to help you get started using infrastructure as code.

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