How I passed the Terraform Associate Certificate after failing on the first attempt...
Tags: career, cloud, certification
Published: 2020-10-05 14:46:41

## My month of September at Glance:

September was a great month as we all know about the #ServerlessSeptember event!
Also, I was able to bag two certifications: AWS SysOps Administrator and Terraform Associate! You can check out my AWS SysOps Administrator exam experience below.

[How I got AWS Certified Sysops Administrator in 2 weeks](https://blog.rishabkumar.com/how-i-got-aws-certified-sysops-administrator-in-2-weeks-ckevs4p6p01ytn1s1b94havwu)
Also, my article on ["How I Built a Resume API with JavaScript and Azure Functions"](https://blog.rishabkumar.com/how-i-built-a-resume-api-with-javascript-and-azure-functions-ckesofyvt00grkls17pir3qd9)
was featured on #ServerlessSeptember!

## Terraform Associate Certification
I am a huge fan of CloudFormation. So being fascinated by the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) I wanted to dive into Terraform and learn the tool.
Few things that impressed me about terraform:
- IaC
- Open Source
- Cloud Agnostic

To start, I checked out the free 2 hours crash course by freeCodeCamp:

{% youtube SLB_c_ayRMo %}

It helps you get started with Terraform and how you can deploy simple infrastructure in AWS, but nothing in-depth. It definitely made me more curious and wanted to learn terraform in-depth. As part of this learning journey, I thought of doing the Terraform Associate Certification. I decided to do a poll on twitter to see what #100DaysOfCloud Community thought!

{% twitter 1305333140454617089 %}

So I decided to go for the certification and went with the [WARP-9](https://warp-9.com/) course for the preparation. It's a 3-hour course and gets you started with Terraform and goes over all the main topics needed for the exam (modules, state files, remote backends, Terraform Cloud, etc.) After completing the course, I decided to take the exam, which didn't turn out to be a good decision, because I only started using and learning terraform 7 days ago. So after a week's preparation, I failed the exam just by 3%, I felt miserable.

{% twitter 1308841399782199296 %}

After getting my detailed result, I realized what I lacked, and focused on the sections that I was weaker in. Also, the main thing I missed was, not going over the Hashicorp documentation.
So for another week, I decided to go over the course again and read through the documentation.
I decided to take my exam this Wednesday, 30th Sept, and always had a doubt in my head, if I am jumping too fast! (Since I failed it last Tuesday!) But I passed and scored 75%.  

{% twitter 1311688620777115650 %}

To conclude, I will list all the resources that I used to prepare for this exam!

- [WARP-9 Training](https://warp-9.com/p/terraform-certification-prep-course)
- [Hashicorp documentation](https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/terraform/associate-study?in=terraform/certification)
- [Practice Questions](https://medium.com/bb-tutorials-and-thoughts/250-practice-questions-for-terraform-associate-certification-7a3ccebe6a1a)
- [My personal notes](https://rishabkumar7.github.io/CloudNotes/)


I hope my experience helps you prepare well for the exam, you can reach out to me on [Twitter](https://twiteer.com/rishabk7) if you have any questions or concerns in regards to Terraform.