Terraform Hashicorp Associate exam: Study and exam

I passed my terraform hashicorp associate exam in the month of November 2022. In this blog post I want to highlight the preparation time for different levels and what kind of questions to expect in the exam and what resources I used to pass the exam.

Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash

How much of Terraform do you use on a day to day basis?

Ask yourself this question, if you are a light user of terraform which means the scripts are already written by someone in the organization and all that needs to be done is to perform a terraform init, terraform plan and terraform apply then allocate about 6–8 weeks of time to understand the tool completely.

If you are a medium user of terraform where you make changes to the existing scripts and understand the concepts a little bit then allocate about 4–6 weeks of time for preparation of the exam.

If you write terraform on a day to day basis and are efficient with the documentation of terraform then this exam is easy and 2 weeks of browsing through the exam guide should help you pass the exam with ease.

Resources:

Resources used to prepare for the exam are

1. A cloud guru lectures — This resource is good enough to understand the basic concepts of terraform and what each concept does, The labs are quite helpful to gain a practical insight into what is to be done and how to use different concepts being taught
2. Udemy Practice exams — This I felt was the most useful, most of the questions are very similar to ones being asked in the exam, though the time limit is a lot lenient it gives a good idea of how to approach the question and if something went wrong in the exam talks about what went wrong and what can be done to correct it.
3. Exam Guide from terraform — One of the very best and free resources to prepare for the exam, this and the udemy practice exams itself will be sufficient enough to get a deeper insight and crack the certification exam.

The Exam:

The certification exam itself is for 60 minutes with 57 question so approximately 1 minute per question, some of them are pretty straight forward that the entire exam may not take that much time, I would suggest reading through the questions deeply as multiple choice correct answers might be tricky at times.

Conclusion:

Everything being said the exam is my first professional certification for a cloud tool and it was relatively smooth process.