I have cleared HashiCorp – Terraform Associate certification last month. It was long due and after enough preparation its finally checked in my to do list. In this exam i have experienced something new, “Its one thing to practice a technology and may be you are good at it as well but you won’t able to understand all of its features until you study it.”

I am gonna hight light some points which helped to study for the exam and what to expect on the exam day.

Why “Terraform” is important?

1. IaC is important for incremental updates in every infrastructure project and terraform is the highest used IaC tool in the market.
2. Well written Terraform documentation are regularly maintained modules.
3. Its Code is easy to read and maintain apart from state file for which we have others solutions like S3
4. Can be executed from a remote agent like Jenkins
5. Wide variety of officially maintained providers which comes in handy every single time

How to prepare for the exam?

1. I have been using terraform for almost 3 years now, but still practicing a tech and preparing for it exam are two different things
2. So i bought two Udemy courses to prepare for the exam.
   1. First: “Terraform for the Absolute Beginners with Labs <link> https://www.udemy.com/course/terraform-for-the-absolute-beginners/” Its not focused on the certification but its more about learning terraform.
   2. Second: “HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Practice Exam 2023 <link> https://www.udemy.com/course/terraform-associate-practice-exam/” this is very crucial. These practice exams will give you confidence of passing the actual exam.
3. Before start preparing I had no idea about Terraform Cloud (paid solution), but its necessary to pass the exam. There will be questions related to that in the exam so do not skip that.

About the exam

1. Its a 1 hour long exam.
2. Invigilator is gonna scan your room, make sure to you are along and your desk clean and no study material or digital device on your desk
3. There are no free re-attempts in this exam.
4. In my exam i got 57 questions which means on average there is only 1 min for every question.
5. There are all multiple choice question, few true/false and few of them with more than one option is true.
6. Don’t spend too much time on a problem flag the questions and come back later if you have time.
7. Click “Submit Answer” every time. Their exam portal is lame as it does not auto save your answer. In the end time I was navigating between my flagged questions and changing my answers as well, but after some time i realised i have to click “Submit Answer” button every single time otherwise it will not save my answers.