Hashicorp Terraform Associate Certification Journey — 2021

Changing infra demands and explosion of public cloud platforms has revolutionized the way organizations design, develop and maintain their IT infrastructure. This new trend of launching and maintaining infrastructure is called Infrastructure as code (IAC).

While it’s good to write infra as code in configuration files and there are many advantages of this approach, it requires a tool which can read this code, parse it and manage infrastructure as per the configuration written. That’s where Terraform comes to our rescue. Terraform is one of the industry leading tool which helps in managing infra defined in such configuration files.

With every leading technology/tool in the market, there is always a big demand of professionals who knows odds and ends around these tools. Certifications are a way to demonstrate your expertise around any such tool/tech. Hashicorp recommends Associate Cloud Certification, a well recognized certification in industry to showcase your terraform skills.

If you are convinced and like to follow a well established certification journey then you are at the right place. So without further ado let’s dive into this.

Important points

• Full certification scope and guide from Hashicorp— HashiCorp Cloud Engineer Certification — Terraform Associate.
• If you are using Terraform Actively, then the preparation of around 2–4 weeks should be enough to clear this exam. Please make sure to evaluate yourself before appearing for the exam.
• The certification exam can be rescheduled till 48 hours before the exam start date without any penalty. I did it once for myself.
• The exam can be launched at-most 30 minutes before the scheduled time.
• The prerequisites like room, id card, face scanning along with their verification takes no less than 30 minutes, please keep this in mind.
• The exam has 57 questions with 60 minutes duration.
• You need 70% to pass the exam. Means minimum 40 correct questions.
• The exam had around 35–40 MCQ (one correct answer), 5–10 MCQ (multiple correct answers), 5–10 (true/false), 3–5 (fill in the blank).

Detailed Certification Journey

My terraform certification journey is quite identical to any other certification journey which most of us follow. It generally involves 4 main steps

• Preparation and Training
• Hands on Practice
• Evaluation and practice exams
• Certification Exam

Preparation and Training

I followed Pluralsight courses for training. There is a clearly defined learning path for terraform associate certificate in Pluralsight. I personally liked the content of the courses under this learning path. These courses cover from very basic to advanced terraform topics. I went through this training course twice just to revisit some of concepts which were not very clear in first go.

Hashicorp Certified: Terraform Associate

Though I strictly followed Pluralsight for preparation, there are similar courses on Udemy to help you groom with terraform on this journey. I personally liked the content of this course though I didn’t try it myself.

Complete Terraform Course — Beginner to Advanced [2021] | Udemy

Once you are done with any of the above courses, I would strongly recommend to follow Exam review guide provided by Hashicorp. Hashicorp has great documentation.

Exam Review — Terraform Associate Certification | Terraform — HashiCorp Learn

Hands-on practice

While trainings/courses are good to get started and guide you on this journey, real fun starts when you actually try things out and there is no shortcut or alternative to it. Looking into the complexity of the exam, I personally don’t advise to go for certification exam without any hands-on. Best part is that terraform is open source. You can download it anywhere and try it out. Its a GO binary(bundled with all it’s dependency) so it doesn’t require any setup to get started. The training courses listed above has everything to help you getting started.

Evaluation and Practice Exams

No matter how much you read or practice , there is something always missed and that’s where evaluation helps. I personally prefer to evaluate my knowledge at-least a week before the exam date. There are 2 reasons for that.

1. You get enough time to revisit some of the concepts where you performed poorly during the evaluation. Just revise these concepts and then re-evaluate till you feel confident.
2. In worst case, if after evaluation you feel that you are still not ready for exam then you can decide to go for it on a later date. Hashicorp allows you to reschedule the exam till 48 hours before the exam starts without any penalty.

There are many practice exams in Udemy to practice for this certification. I generally pick one which has average(4+) rating and economical pricing.

Certification Exam

It’s the moment you have been waiting for. Few very important guidelines to follow in order to start on time.

• You should start 30 minutes before the exam scheduled time. You are not allowed to launch it before that unfortunately but please start as soon as you are allowed. Believe me the whole experience is more than just a certification exam.
• Next step is System Check. Please install PSI Bridge Secure Browser application in advance ( instructions on how to install will come to you in an email after scheduling of exam ) to save sometime before the exam.
• As soon as you launch the exam, in next steps you will be asked to install/launch PSI Bridge Secure Browser. If you have it installed already then it will be launched from there.
• Next you need to follow 3 verification steps in order. 1) You need to send a picture of your ID ( should be a valid government ID with photo and signature on it ). 2) Make a video while Scanning your room including your desk area etc ( around 60–150 sec ). Please have your phone with you as video requires you to record that you are keeping it away at a place which is not reachable from your desk. 3) Take your picture(selfie).
• Send it to your proctor and now you need to wait for 15 minutes for your proctor to verify what you have just uploaded. You are not allowed to leave your place during this time. That makes it quite boring.
• If any of the above steps failed, you will be asked to perform the step again and wait for 15 minutes for proctor to reverify.
• If all goes well, you will be launching your exam soon.

GOOD LUCK !!