I love Terraform.

Well, love is probably too strong of a word - I think it is more accurate to say that I really really really like terraform. In either case, after working and fighting with CloudFormation for years, Terraform is quite a breath of fresh air. In another post in the future, I may touch on why I really liked Terraform over CloudFormation.

In meantime, because I liked Terraform so much that when HashiCorp Terraform exam got out of beta, I immediately voucher and then after a few weeks, I took the exam last week and passed. I would have posted then, but I waited until they send me this:

Achievement unlocked.

(Also, I know that the <center> tag is deprecated. I don't care, I just want to center the badge without going into the weeds with CSS)

Prep Work

While I didn't study specifically for the exam, I have been working with Terraform for sometime, initially using it to stand up my OpenShift lab in AWS last year. At the time, the code a modified copy of somebody's else example terraform code, so I didn't really understand or appreciate what Terraform can do (in retrospect, it wasn't that great). Then, during prep for another Red Hat exam, I rebuild the lab in Ansible and while it worked, it was. . .

Terrible, to put in mildly.

So when the Red Hat exam were canceled and I focused on other certifications, I went back to that copy and along the way, I bought a coupe of Terraform: Up & Running and went through the entire book. Then breakthrough came when I figured out how to used Terraform modules to stand up a VPC. Once that is done, I rewrote the whole AWS lab using modules.

And then I extended the lab to deploy into Digital Ocean and then, I wrote up module to stand up a lab in Scaleway as well as provision resources into NS1.

So by the time I decided to take the exam, it didn't take much to prep. I just read through the exam review and brush up on things I didn't know much (and along the way, learn a few new things too). Of course, it helps to work with CloudFormation, as the core concepts are the same for both CloudFormation and Terraform.

Exam Experience

Once I was done with the review, I scheduled the exam. It is a remote proctored exam, so it was nice to take the exam at home and not to have to worry about travel or worse. I was able to find the slot within the same day, so out of giggles, I scheduled it at 7:00 PM. Then I logged in about 15 minute before the exam, waited for the proctor to verify my identity and then I was on my way through the exam.

The exam was about 60 minutes, but I was able to answer most of the question in about 30 minutes. I wasn't expecting to pass, sine I didn't do much prep work, so I was happy that I got the passing score, which is confirmed by an email from HashiCorp. The actual digital badge took until today to arrive, though.

Conclusion

Overall, I was pretty happy with the experience. And at $70.50 USD, it was a bargain in comparison to other certifications. If you decided to take the exam, I would suggest the following minimum requirements:

• Some programming experience.
• Some cloud experience (AWS, Azure, etc).
• Some understanding on cloud automation and management.

I would also suggest:

• A GitHub account, not just to store your code, but also able to authenticate into HashiCorp's exam.
• You own cloud account to practice. AWS is recommended, but you can get far with something like a Digital Ocean. You can click on this link to sign up, while giving me credits to continue practicing ;)

For experienced users, I would recommend going through the exam review. For beginners, the Learn Terraform while users with paid platforms like Linux Academy may be able to find ready courses. For books, Terraform: Up & Running was my go to book, but I heard good things about the Terraform book

And finally - very important, as of May 19, 2020, the version in the exam is 0.12, so use that to learn and practice. Even if you don't intend to take the exam, it would be a good idea to upgrade, as there are big improvements with that versions.