HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

Finally received my 1st non-Red Hat certificate. I was among the first group to pass Terraform Associate exam at HashiConf'19, as HashiCorp certification program is still in beta. The exam is a multiple-choice test going on for 1 hour. While not as deep as a hands-on exam (it's Associate, after all), it certainly challenges understanding of basic concepts and operations. On the scale 1 to 10 in terms of required expertise, I would rate it as 3.

Terraform is HashiCorp's answer to the problem of multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning and Infrastructure-as-a-Code. It follows general pattern of Write -> Plan -> Apply that allows you to apply changes to your infrastructure iteratively after making sure the execution plan includes exactly what you expect. Terraform configuration is written in HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), a subset of JSON. Even though it's not a configuration management solution and there are much more suitable tools to fill that niche (I prefer Ansible), it offers limited software configuration capabilities by means of provisioners. Here are my favorite features so far:

• Dynamic dependency resolution. Making one resource dependent on another (for example, AWS Elastic IP has to be allocated and assigned after the corresponding AWS EC2 instance) is as easy as referencing it in the corresponding attribute.
• Support for clustered configurations, where provisioners can't be attached to a single resource, but have to be executed against all of them. This is achieved via so-called null_resource that essentially serves as an anchor for cluster-wide provisioners.

Exam objectives can be found here.