This is the last part of my Terraform Certified Associate course. In this part I will go through the capabilities of Terraform Cloud.

Part four of the Certified Terraform Associate exam curriculum concerns using Terraform outside of the core workflow. This includes things like manipulating Terraform state using the CLI, and importing resources from outside Terraform into your configuration. Generally these are advanced topics, but highly relevant for real-world Terraform usage!

Terraform stores its known version of the real world in a state file. A state file is at its core a JSON file containing details about all resources that are part of the Terraform configuration you are working with. In this lesson we will look at why we need a state file, how we can store the state file in different backends, and how we work with state.

In this long lesson I will go through the important details about Terraform modules for the Certified Terraform Associate exam. Modules are at its core just a collection of Terraform files located in the same directory, but we’ll see how they are used and what purpose they serve.

In this lesson I go through the few piece that are left in section 8 of the exam curriculum. Specifically I will go through collection and structural types, a few details of Terraform functions, and describe the built-in dependency management.

Data sources are used to access data from outside of your current Terraform configuration. In this short lesson we will look at how to define a data source in HCL and see two specific things we can use data sources for.

We continue our journey through the building blocks of Terraform by looking at the main type of HCL block: resources! Resources are what everything is all about.

This is the second lesson of a few where we will look at the different kinds of HCL blocks available in Terraform. In this lesson we look at outputs. Outputs are similar to return values for functions in programming languages. An output can contain properties of interest from the resources that we create with Terraform, or they could be more complex structures containing multiple pieces of data. We will see how to declare outputs in Terraform, how we can read the outputs using the Terraform CLI.

This is the first lesson of a few where we will look at the different kinds of HCL blocks available in Terraform. In this lesson we look at variables. Variables are input to our Terraform configurations. We will see how to declare variables in Terraform, different ways to provide values for our variables from the outside, and how we can use variables in the rest of our Terraform configuration.

In this lesson we go through the core Terraform workflow. This workflow consists of the most common steps that you will use when working with Terraform: init, validate, fmt, plan, apply, and destroy!