In September 2024 HashiCorp released the long awaited Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional certification. This is the second professional level certification from HashiCorp1.
The first version of this certification focuses on Terraform with the AWS provider. This decision was welcomed with open arms by the AWS/Terraform campus, but not so much by the Azure and GCP campuses. In due time, there will be versions for these providers, too.
In this blog post I want to briefly go through what this certification is and how you can prepare for it.
What is the Terraform Professional Certification?#
To understand what the professional level certification is we should first understand the associate level certification.
The Terraform Associate certification tests you on your understanding of the basics of Terraform. You should have an understanding of the workflows involved when running Terraform, and know the commands involved.
The professional level certification has one major difference from the associate level certification: it is lab-based, expecting you to perform tasks hands on. In a sense, this is the only difference between the two exams. Understanding Terraform as a theoretical level is enough for the associate level exam, but you need to know how to practically use Terraform for the professional level exam. This means that if you study hard enough for the associate level exam, then chances are you are already well prepared for the professional level exam. With that said, do not underestimate the professional exam!
When you sit down to take the professional exam you will be met with a number of multiple-choice questions to get you started. When you are done with these you move on to a number of lab scenarios. Each scenario consists of several tasks that you need to perform. These tasks will involve writing HCL and running Terraform CLI commands.
During the exam you have access to the Terraform documentation and parts of the AWS provider documentation. The documentation is also available for the multiple-choice questions.
You have a total of four hours to complete the exam. This includes reading through the instructions at the start of the exam. Do not underestimate how quick these four hours will pass!
If you have previously done the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) or a similar exam, then you will feel familiar with the Terraform professional exam. However, in my experience the scenarios for the CKAD are a lot shorter (but there are more of them) than in the Terraform exam.
Do you need to know Amazon Web Services?#
How much AWS do you need to know for the exam?
It is difficult to say for sure. If you have experience using Terraform with AWS, and specifically configuring credentials for the AWS provider, then I think you are in a good position.
You should have familiarity with basic resources on AWS (networking, compute, storage).
AWS is not the focus of the exam, but the exam must revolve around a cloud provider because this is how Terraform is most often used in practice.
How to prepare for the professional certification#
Since this is a lab based exam, you must know how to use Terraform hands on in a terminal environment and in a code editor. You need to know how to write HCL code and run Terraform commands. There is only one way to get this hands-on practice: just sit down and do it. If you are lucky you use Terraform in your day-to-day job and get constant hands-on practice. However, some workflows that are part of the exam belong in a category of workflows that are not performed that often. One example is breaking down a Terraform configuration into modules, or importing a large number of resources into your Terraform configuration.
If you are getting started with Terraform I recommend going through all (or as many as you can muster) the official tutorials available here. This will give you a good ground to stand on for the rest of your exam preparation.
I have written the most comprehensive, yet focused, study guide for the exam. This book is 200+ pages and it covers each exam objective in detail. Each exam objective is covered in theory and with examples and sample code available on GitHub. I have gotten great feedback letting me know that this is a high-quality study guide.
To get a feel for the format of this book you can read a sample chapter here:
I am a big fan of reading books, and that is why I wrote a book about this exam that I would want to read myself. However, reading books is not the most effective way of learning for everyone. There are video courses appearing that cover this certification. I have no experience with any of them so I can’t make any specific recommendation.
What I can do is recommend following Ned in the Cloud on YouTube, he has (at the time of this writing) released one video covering one specific topic of interest for the exam (full video on YouTube available here www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4xJLgfKjOI):
You should go through the official study guide and exam orientation video to help you prepare for the exam. This material is available here:
Finally, I was actually on Ned’s show talking about the exam (full video on YouTube available here www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnXc_2x_g5E):
Conclusions#
The Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional certification is available and it is a lot of fun!
In this short blog post I explained what this certification is and gave you a few suggestions on what you can do to prepare for the exam. The amount of content for preparation available online is still a bit sparse, nowhere near as much as for the associate level exam. However, of course I want to promote my own book once again - it is a comprehensive study guide aimed at preparing you for the exam.
Find the book at leanpub.com/terraform-professional-certification
The first one being the Vault Operator Professional certification. ↩︎
