A Complete Manual for Terraform Certification
The HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Certification is one of several HashiCorp Cloud Engineering Certifications that allow cloud engineers to demonstrate and validate their expertise in multi-cloud. Information on Practical Exams (Costs, Timings, Booking Process, etc.). The following are some critical relevant exam details:
• The Terraform certification costs/examination costs $70.50.
• The exam is only available as an online-proctored exam (a webcam and microphone are required).
• You have one hour to finish the exam.
• It consists of about 45 questions.
• You can take the exam only in the English language.
How to book the exam:
• Go to the HashiCorp Questionmark partner page and Log in with your GitHub credentials , you can sign up for one for free.
• Once prompted to return to the home page, click “Buy Exam” at the top.
• Once you make payment, return to the homepage, and click “My Assessments” at the top to schedule the exam for a time that works for you.
• When you schedule your exam, use the pre-assessment system check to ensure that your machine is ready to go and to avoid any issues that might prevent you from taking the exam.
There are two prerequisites for the exam:
• Basic knowledge of on-premises and cloud architecture.
• Basic terminal skills.
What to Expect (Length, Structure, Content)
Regarding the Terraform certificate exam format, HashiCorp has offered a set of example questions that illustrate the various questions you’ll encounter. These consist of:
• True or False
• Single response with multiple choice
• Multiple-choice questions with options
• Text match, in which you select the appropriate text insert or command from a list of potential responses.
Regarding the topic, the Exam Objectives provide you with a detailed overview of what you must understand for each subject.
The following are the nine main goals:
• Recognize concepts related to infrastructure as code (IaC)
• Recognize Terraform’s purpose (versus other IaC)
• Basic Terraform knowledge
• Employ Terraform CLI (outside of core workflow)
• Work with the Terraform modules
• Workflow navigation in Terraform
• Establish and uphold state
• Reading, creating, and altering configuration
• Recognize Terraform Cloud and Enterprise features
How much time will I need to pass?
You may be keen to know how long it will take to clear Terraform certification, as you have all the advice and resources to do so. Certified engineers claim that your Terraform proficiency during the exam period has a significant role in this.
You should be prepared to pass if you’ve finished an appropriate terraform course, read through the HashiCorp documentation, and participate in as many available tutorials as possible.
For those individuals, who are new to Terraform, 20 to 25 hours should be plenty to take an online course, go over the study materials, and engage in some hands-on testing to become comfortable with the various ideas. Since Terraform is a cloud-agnostic tool, there is no need to worry about practicing with different cloud providers. Choose your preferred cloud provider (or whichever one you are already comfortable with) and start executing.
Practical Preparation Steps
Here are some concrete actions you may do to get ready for the test:
• Read the official HashiCorp Study Guide, which includes some helpful Terraform online training courses and reference material and lists the several basic disciplines you need to be familiar with
• Find a video course online.
• Use Terraform to deploy resources into a brand-new AWS account. It will teach you several ways to configure the providers, best practices for access, etc.
• Create a Terraform Cloud account and try out using Sentinel rules and the remote backend of Terraform Cloud.
• Make sure you cover all the necessary material by reading the Exam Review.
• Complete some online Terraform training tests.
Terraform Resources
• Provisioners — Why Provisioners should only get used as a last resort – This article explains why provisioners should only get used in extreme cases. You can run remote commands and the like, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. At this point, your IaC has too many assumptions that are, in a sense, used outside of Terraform.
• Modules — To avoid copying and pasting complete implementations of your code between contexts, use the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) concept and construct and reuse modules.
• Providers — Use an alias to distinguish between two (or more) providers, such as AWS, that you need to use in your Terraform code. Then, reference those providers in the appropriate code blocks.
• Dynamic Blocks — We can already say that you will likely spend the most time on Dynamic blocks. However, it will be worthwhile to give the terraform IaC solutions!
• Expressions — To ensure DRY principles and avoid baking VARS into your Terraform Code blocks (a no-no! ), the Dynamic Blocks in the point above may frequently force you to use your imagination and work on expressions.
