Become a HashiCorp Consul Associate Certification to substantiate your networking automation skills. The HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Exam is one of the four product certification exams from HashiCorp Cloud Engineer Certifications, enabling cloud engineers to demonstrate their service networking expertise using HashiCorp Consul.
In this article, we will write a detailed steps on how to prepare and pass the hashicorp consul certification exam. We explain what type of training materials, exam practice questions or dumps, practical experience and many others tips to prepare for the consul certification exam.
What is Consul?
Consul is one of the four HashiCorp multi-cloud tools, including Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. HashiCorp Consul provides a fully-featured service mesh to enable encrypted networking within service-oriented architectures, typically microservices. Though microservices provide development and deployment agility, they can increase network latency and compromise application traffic. Consul tackles network latency and traffic encryption issues by introducing:
- Central service registry for service discovery,
- Central key-value store to save application configuration
- Encrypted service segmentation using service graph and TLS certificate authority
Consul automates many crucial networking tasks to reduce the burden on developers and operators. Tight integrations with Nomad and Kubernetes allow developers agility and velocity while operators leverage mutual TLS encryptions to improve application layer security, allowing better consistency and security.
Let’s discuss all the components of Hashicorp Consul certification in detail.
Who can take HashiCorp Consul Associate Certification?
The Consul Associate Certification can be taken by following job roles:
- Site Reliability Engineers
- Solutions Architects
- DevOps professionals
- Cloud Engineers
What you will learn in the HashiCorp Consul Associate Certification?
You can gain knowledge on core concepts of Hashicorp consul by taking HashiCorp Consul Associate Certification:
- Overview of Consul and Its Core Capabilities
- Deploying and Setting Up Consul
- Service Discovery and Health Monitoring in Consul
- Utilizing Consul’s Key-Value Data Store
- Enabling Secure Communication via Consul Connect
- Managing Consul’s Configuration and Operations
- Enhancing Security with Consul ACLs and Recommended Practices
- Integrating Consul with HashiCorp’s Suite of Tools
- Recommended Strategies for Production-Grade Consul Deployment
What are the benefits of taking HashiCorp Consul Associate Certification?
Better Operational Function: Automating network processes allows users to do jobs in a fraction of the time it would take them to accomplish them manually, resulting in a considerable increase in performance.
Less Likelihood of Errors: Since complicated network approaches lack the human element, it is much less likely that mistakes will be made via carelessness or oversight.
Lower Operational Expenses: By reducing time, errors, and maximising efficiency, the network becomes quick and agile, which supports application deployment and development efforts. As a result, businesses can cut costs while achieving better results. Additionally, automation makes better use of the resources that would otherwise need to be devoted to monotonous network tasks, leading to further cost savings.
HashiCorp Networking Automation Certification Exam
To become a Hashicorp Certified Consul Associate, you must pass the HashiCorp Networking Automation certification exam. This HashiCorp Consul associate certification exam is intended mainly for cloud engineers, including solution architects, DevOps professionals, and site reliability engineers.
HashiCorp Consul Certification Exam Prerequisites
Along with having a basic understanding of the open-source HashiCorp Consul, candidates must have:
- Basic terminal skills
- Sound containerization knowledge (like Docker or Kubernetes)
- Basic networking proficiency with load balancing and distributed systems
- Understand the use of ACL network filters
- Understand TLS certificate lifecycle
HashiCorp Consul Certification Exam Details
Candidates can only take the Consul Associate exam three times in one year with a seven-day waiting period between exam attempts. Upon passing the certification exam, successful candidates are awarded a digital badge that can be shared and verified online. Further exam details are given below:
Steps to Prepare for the HashiCorp Consul Certification Exam
To become a Hashicorp Certified Consul Associate, we recommend the following preparation steps:
1. Understand the Consul Associate Exam Objectives
For best preparation, candidates must have professional experience implementing the Consul Associate exam objectives using HashiCorp Consul. But they can also prepare for the exam using a personal demo environment. Each exam objective has various sub-sections that cover all components of Consul. Primary exam objects are given below.
- Explain Consul architecture
- Deploy a single datacenter
- Register services and use service discovery
- Access the Consul key/value (KV)
- Back up and restore
- Use Consul service mesh
- Secure agent communication
- Secure services with basic access control lists (ACL)
- Use gossip encryption
2. Master HashiCorp Consul with the Official Consul Associate Study Guide
As part of the HashiCorp Learn platform, the Consul Associate study guide offers in-depth knowledge about all the exam objectives. The study guide provides links to Consul documentation and various learning tutorials, covering each sub-section in detail. The Consul documentation offers candidates the necessary theoretical knowledge about networking automation, while the learning tutorials enable hands-on training.
The study guide also has “Study Tips” for each exam objective, highlighting major learning takeaways and allowing candidates to focus on the exact Consul knowledge they must acquire to pass the exam.
3. Scan the Consul Associate Review Guide for Selected Learning
The Consul Associate review guide is a concise version of the detailed study guide, meant for candidates with more experience in using Consul. It provides a quick overview of Consul documentation and tutorials covered under each exam objective, allowing candidates to review only the selected topics they want to revise before the exam. Think of it as a table of content for the Consul Associate study guide. Or use it as a checklist for objectives you have covered completely.
4. Video Course
Once you have gone through the official documents provided by the Hashicorp, it’s time to spend few dollars to buy a good video course content to prepare for this certification exam. You need to go through every chapter or lectures to understand the concepts and practice using the Hashicorp consul hands-on labs.
5. Understand Consul Associate Exam Format with Sample Questions
Learning everything in the Consul documentation or following the tutorials is not enough. Candidates must be well versed with the exam format beforehand for best results. The HashiCorp Consul Associate Exam mainly contains two types of questions.
- True/false questions
- Multiple-choice questions
- Type-in-the-command
- UI-based questions
- Scenario-based questions
Multiple-choice questions have three categories to test the candidate’s knowledge of various commands/queries, Consul UI, and use cases. All questions are related to the content associated with the exam objectives. Go through the HashiCorp Consul Associate sample questions to better understand the exam format.
6. Hands-on Experience Matters
Candidates cannot obtain the HashiCorp Consul certification by learning theoretical concepts without hands-on Consul training. They must follow the HashiCorp Consul training tutorials available on the HashiCorp Learn platform to improve their chances of success.
In addition, candidates who prefer video training can enroll in Whizlab’s Hashicorp Certified Consul Associate course, taught by HashiCorp certified professionals.
7. Try Practice Questions
Sample questions are only good if you want to understand the exam format. If you’re going to pass the Consul Associate exam on the first attempt, make sure to try out some practice exams. Practice exam questions allow candidates to observe how the actual exam looks and build their confidence.
Additionally, practice exams or hashicorp consul certification practice questions give a reasonable estimate of the complexity of the questions and the total time it takes to attempt the exam. Scoring more points in the practice or mock exams can improve your success rate in the actual proctored exam.
Try out some Consul Associate practice tests offered by Whizlabs. Improve your score in practice and do well in the actual certification exam.
General Exam Day Tips
1. Manage Time
As with any other exam, candidates must be ready for this online proctored exam at least 15 minutes before. There is nothing worse than wasting your precious exam time setting up your system. HashiCorp sends detailed exam guidelines to each candidate to streamline the setup process. Make sure to follow it by the book.
Also, during the exam, don’t waste your time on a single question. You are not supposed to know everything. Move on.
2. Internet Connectivity
High-speed internet is a must in online-proctored exams (and everywhere else). You don’t want to halt the exam due to connectivity issues. Make sure to arrange a high-speed stable internet connection before the exam.
3. Check Webcam
Since HashiCorp certification exams are conducted under real-time proctored supervision, candidates are required to arrange a webcam and turn their video on for the entire exam duration without any interruptions.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I pass HashiCorp terraform Associate certification?
You have to follow the above steps explained in this blog post. In short here is the summary:
- Go through official guide / objectives
- Purchase a video course
- Try hands-on labs
- Try practice questions using available mock exams like Whizlabs
Is HashiCorp certification free?
No. Hashicorp certification exams are not free. You have to pay only for what you use.
What is the HashiCorp consul used for?
What is the cost of consul associate certification exam?
The cost of the conssul associate certification exam is $70.50
Summary
This blog post explains everything about the Hashicorp Consul Associate Certification exam and its preparation techniques. The HashiCorp Consul certification enables professionals working on the HashiCorp stack to demonstrate and validate multi-cloud service networking skills. We are hopeful that with our recommended exam preparation steps and a lot of hard work, candidates can become HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate in the first attempt.
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