My experience with HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate 2021

4 min readMay 30, 2021

Intro

As a DevOps professional, we deal with various cloud providers on a daily basis, and is often responsible for setting up landing zones or provisioning cloud infrastructure on behalf of our clients. One of the most used IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tools at the moment is Terraform by Hashicorp. It’s open source, cloud agnostic, and has a growing community behind them. Here is my experience on passing the Terraform Associate exam if you plan on taking it in 2021.

Preparation Time Frame

Luckily terraform isn’t as complex of a tool as Kubernetes. Their documentation is fairly short and easy to digest. If you have experience working with terraform CLI in any capacity or even if you are starting from scratch, it shouldn’t take you any longer than 1 month to understand the tool and pass your exam. Here is my estimation of the time it may take for someone to complete this certification. Your results may vary depending on how much time you dedicate towards this endeavor and how efficiently you study.

My estimation of the time required for acquiring Terraform Associate certification

My Learning Stack

There are plenty of learning resources out there for the Certified Terraform Associate Exam. I’m going to share with you the resources I have personally used. As with any exams, the most important aspect about preparing for the exam is to get your hands-on practice as soon as possible.

HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate Course on ACloudGuru
This was the course I took as a precursor to the exam, though I do not think it went as in depth and as comprehensive as other ACloudGuru courses on other topics, it was a good introduction to terraform.

Testpreptraining.com (Highly Recommend)
It is always a good idea to test your knowledge before an exam with a set of practice questions, these are the ones I’ve used and I highly recommend the paid version.

Exam Review by Hashicorp (Highly Recommend)
Official material is always better than unofficial material in many situations as they will provide you exactly what you need to know. You can either use this as the main structure to your study or supplement your study with it.

Exam Review by Hashicorp (Highly Recommend)
Another learning material by Hashicorp.

Other learning materials do exist out there such as PluralSight, Udemy etc. I have not dabbled in those so I cannot provide you with my opinion, but I have heard other succeed with them so feel free to check them out.

Example Questions

I do plan to write a comprehensive list of questions on Terraform Associate which I came up on my own. Follow me if you would like to see them in the near future.

What does terraform refresh do to terraform state?

Refreshing a terraform state updates the attributes of managed resources in the cloud with your current state file
https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/commands/refresh.html

2. What is the difference between a provisioner and a provider?

A provider is a plugin that adds a set of resource types and data sources that terraform can manage, while a provisioner is used to model specific actions on a local or remote machine in order to prepare servers or other infrastructure for service
https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/resources/provisioners/syntax.html
https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/index.html

3. What is the difference between terraform state list and terraform show and terraform state show?

4. Where is the state file stored when it is created in another workspace in the CLI?

It is stored under $WORKING_DIRECTORY/terraform.tfstate.d/WORKSPACE_NAME/terraform.tfstate
https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/state/workspaces.html

5. What is the difference between locals and input variable?

Input variables serve as parameters for a Terraform module. A local value assigns a name to an expression, so you can use it multiple times within a module without repeating it.

Conclusion

Hashicorp Terraform Associate exam is an exam that tests your theoretical knowledge working with terraform. If you have some hands on experience using terraform that will definitely help you pass the exam but it is not necessary. The tool itself has a large community behind it and each cloud provider has its own modules which is a whole different set of documentations which truly unlocks the power of IaC. All in all, terraform associate is not the hardest exam out there and can be completed in a short amount of time to add some sense of accomplishment / credential to your profile. Execution is everything.

Good luck!