Course Overview

Let’s establish the intended audience of this course and what HashiCorp Terraform is.

We'll cover the following

In this course, you’ll prepare to earn the Terraform Associate certification from HashiCorp. This course assumes you’ve experimented with Terraform as a hobbyist or in a development environment, and you’re excited to deploy infrastructure as code. Here, you’ll sharpen your skills and your knowledge in preparation to earn a certification from HashiCorp. Terraform is an amazing tool for deploying Infrastructure as Code in a cloud-agnostic way.

Terraform Associate certification

The certification exam is based on a list of exam objectives published by HashiCorp. Each terminal objective is broken into a set of enabling objectives that will test your knowledge and experience. This course is structured so that each chapter is mapped to a terminal objective and each lesson deals with each enabling objective.

Though this is a useful form of preparation, there’s no substitute for hands-on practical experience. As you move through the course, you should be working with your code editor of choice… This course provides many examples, but you should always experiment on your own. Experimenting with Terraform isn’t only fun, but it will also improve your knowledge and understanding faster than studying alone.

Prerequisites

The Terraform Associate certification is targeted at professionals in IT, DevOps, and operations roles who have basic knowledge about Infrastructure as Code and HashiCorp Terraform.

Before taking the exam, we should note several terminal objectives and the enabling objectives that support each terminal target.

There are some prerequisites you should have before we get started with Terraform:

  • Basic skills in a terminal environment are necessary.
  • Basic understanding of infrastructure components on-premises and in the cloud is needed.
  • Familiarity with a scripting language is necessary.
  • Familiarity with basic development concepts is requierd.
  • Access to a cloud provider is needed.

You can use whatever code editor and operating system works best for you. Terraform is written in Go and compiled as a binary for each OS, so it makes no difference which one you choose. We’ll be using Educative’s editor.

Introduction to HashiCorp Terraform

Terraform is an example of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)—the managing and furnishing of infrastructure through code instead of manual processes—and therefore, HashiCorp expects that you have a fundamental understanding of what IaC is and some of its concepts and patterns. This exam objective is not focused specifically around Terraform itself but also covers general topics of Infrastructure as Code.