How I passed Terraform Associate Exam?
I had no prior knowledge and it took me 60 days to clear this
Who am I?
I'm Maran Sowthri Kalailingam, Senior Software Engineer @ athenahealth
When did I get certified?
On 7th March 2022. You can check out my badge here
Here's how I did it
I'm a big fan of Fireship and his 100 seconds series. Several months ago, he released Terraform in 100 seconds
That was the first time I heard about Terraform. As an AWS Certified Developer Associate, I was 100% sure that this will be a big thing. I had been using CloudFormation as an IaC tool. I won't say it's bad, but Terraform is far better than that.
Mainly because
Terraform is Cloud Agnostic. Meaning, Terraform can manage infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms (such as AWS, Azure & GCP) at the same time.
Your IaC will look like a configuration file (such as below). This human-readable language helps you understand the existing setup and write infrastructure code quickly.
resource "aws_instance" "web" {
ami = "ami-08e4e35cccc6189f4"
instance_type = "t3.micro"
tags = {
Name = "HelloWorld"
}
}
While I was trying to learn more about Terraform, I found that they also provide certifications. So I decided to give it a shot.
On Jan 8, 2022, I bought HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Course on Udemy for 20$. It's a 10 hours on-demand course prepared by Zeal Vohra. Zeal is a DevOps engineer and worked as a consultant for multiple organizations. Though this course is specifically designed for certifications, he will also give you real-time examples of what problems Terraform is solving and why it is better that other IaC tools out there.
So, I prepared my schedule and started doing the course the very next day.
The first 10 days passed. I had to say this, "this is not complex at all". It's way simpler than the AWS Certification that I did earlier. If you have experience with any one of the programming languages, you will also feel the same. I started watching the tutorials at 2x speed. But at the same time, I was trying out all concepts locally with my AWS account.
A Month passed. I finished the course and attended practice tests which were provided there.
This is not bad, but the gap is huge. So just to assess myself, I bought Terraform Associate Practice Exam Bundle on Udemy for 7$. I took one exam a day and revised the results the next day.
This boosted my confidence level. I wanted to schedule my exam for the next weekend. But for some personal reasons, I was occupied on Saturday & Sunday. I couldn't schedule it for the next week, since the next 5 days were working days. So just to keep my knowledge refreshed and not miss out on anything, I bought one more Terraform Practice Exam Bundle on WhizLabs for 5$. But this is completely optional for you.
Here also results are pretty much the same.
Next weekend comes, I scheduled my exam at 5:45 AM on 17th Mar 2022 by paying 71$ + tax.
The day came, and I appeared 30 mins before the exam. I finished it on time and got the results on the same day.
P.S. My company athenahealth reimbursed my entire examination fees 💖
Roadmap
Udemy - HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Practice Exam 2022
Whizlabs - HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate - Practice Tests
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