My Journey to HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
By: Sandeep Baldawa
Tags: Hashicorp Certified, Kubernetes, DevOps, Terraform, Infrastructure As Code

Background

Terraform is the infrastructure as a Code (IaC) offering from HashiCorp. It is a tool for building, changing and managing infrastructure in a safe, repeatable way.

It is based on similar IaC philosophy as Aws’s CloudFormation. Operators and Infrastructure teams can use Terraform to manage environments with a configuration language called the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) for human-readable, automated deployments.

The Terraform Associate certification is either for those cloud engineers that specialize in operations/IT, or for those developers who know or would like to know the basic concepts, and skills associated with open source HashiCorp Terraform.

I have used infrastructure tools with APIs and scripting from VMware, Citrix etc. Terraform takes it a notch above and makes it extremely easy to have your scripts work across different cloud vendors like Azure, AWS, GCS etc. I’m extremely impressed by the ease of use for this product. The ecosystem is growing exponentially and has an active community contributing to Terraform.

Who should take this exam

Folks who would like to learn terraform (even if you have been using it for a while, I think you will learn something). There are tons of other advantages as to what Infrastructure as code provides (see here) and is an extremely handy and sought after skill in today’s DevOps world.

My 2c regarding certifications is that a good certification provides a structured approach to learning new technology as every one might not get to work on all technologies all the time. Another approach could be to do a project and learn. Everyone has different styles, certifications work best for me to start with before I work on a project.

Planning hacks

There are no official prerequisites for this exam. However, I would highly recommend the following to be better prepared:

Understanding of at least one public cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, etc. Basic terminal skills and a basic understanding of On-premises and cloud architecture. Patience to go over Hashicorp terraform documentation :)

4. Have a completion plan — Set a date to complete this course.

5. Check these questions, once you are ready

6. Take help from folks who might know about this(there is no shame, we are all here to learn). I would highly recommend using the forums from Hashicorp.

7. Have two sets of notes (one detailed one) and one like a cheatsheet, the cheatsheet would be extremely handy to go over before the exams

Preparation

There are a lot of tutorials out there. The following docs helped in preparing me better:

I took around 10 days to prepare (as am relatively new to terraform), also tried all exercises from the Udemy course. I have a family with two kids, so I spend around 2 hours every day, this might be much lesser time for others depending on the situation.

Finally, ensure that you register for your exam (see here).

Course content and review

In the fullness of time, I won't go over the details of the course which is covered very well by lot of other blogs. I would recommend the Udemy course for those folks who are Terraform newbies. I absolutely loved learning Terraform tool via this course.

Terraform’s official docs are a hit or miss. For some areas, they seemed more confusing to me, but overall not bad.

Exam

The exam is a 1 hour proctored exam which one can take online from the comfort of their home. The slots for the exam are easily available round the clock to accommodate different time zones.

The overall exam was good and validated the learnings. I would read the documentation from Hashicorp carefully, nothing in the exam was from outside the documentation. The pass marks are 70%.

The exam is not as straightforward and has quite a few tricky questions, so would recommend reading the questions slowly, 60 minutes is mostly enough to solve these, so no need to hurry through them. You can always skip the difficult questions and come back to them later.

In summary would highly recommend this certification, unlike other certifications it is practical and gives you a good overview of terraform.

That's all for now, till next time, ciao!