Cloud engineers can use the Consul Associate exam from HashiCorp to verify their basic networking automation skills.
HashiCorp Networking Automation Certification
HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate
The Consul Associate Certification is for Site Reliability Engineers, Solutions Architects, DevOps professionals, or other Cloud Engineers who know the basic concepts and skills to build, secure, and maintain open source HashiCorp Consul. Candidates will be best prepared for this exam if they have professional experience using Consul in production, but performing the exam objectives in a personal demo environment may also be sufficient. This person understands what enterprise features exist and what can and cannot be done using the open source offering. Visit our exam partner to schedule and take the exam.
Prerequisites
- Containerization knowledge
- Basic terminal skills
- Networking skills including load balancing and distributed systems
- Understand the purpose of ACLs
- Experience with TLS certificate lifecycle
Product Version Tested
Consul 1.7 or higher
Preparing for the Exam
You will be tested based on the objectives below. The Getting Started content on the HashiCorp Learn platform was referenced heavily during exam creation and is a good place to start studying. Visit the review guide if you already have Consul experience and/or training and want to pick and choose which objectives to review before taking the exam. There are also sample questions available so you can get a feel for what the exam will be like.
Exam Details
| Type | Multiple choice |
|---|---|
| Duration | 1 hour |
| Language | English |
Exam Objectives
| 1 | Explain Consul architecture |
|---|---|
| 1a | Identify the components of Consul datacenter, including agents and communication protocols |
| 1b | Prepare Consul for high availability and performance |
| 1c | Identify Consul's core functionality |
| 1d | Differentiate agent roles |
| 2 | Deploy a single datacenter |
|---|---|
| 2a | Start and manage the Consul process |
| 2b | Interpret a Consul agent configuration |
| 2c | Configure Consul network addresses and ports |
| 2d | Describe and configure agent join and leave behaviors |
| 3 | Register services and use service discovery |
|---|---|
| 3a | Interpret a service registration |
| 3b | Differentiate ways to register a single service |
| 3c | Interpret a service configuration with health check |
| 3d | Check the service catalog status from the output of the DNS/API interface or via the Consul UI |
| 3e | Interpret a prepared query |
| 3f | Use a prepared query |
| 4 | Access the Consul key/value (KV) |
|---|---|
| 4a | Understand the capabilities and limitations of the KV store |
| 4b | Interact with the KV store using both the Consul CLI and UI |
| 4c | Monitor KV changes using watch |
| 4d | Monitor KV changes using envconsul and consul-template |
| 5 | Back up and restore |
|---|---|
| 5a | Describe the content of a snapshot |
| 5b | Back up and restore the datacenter |
| 5c | [Enterprise] Describe the benefits of snapshot agent features |
| 6 | Use Consul service mesh |
|---|---|
| 6a | Understand Consul Connect service mesh high level architecture |
| 6b | Describe configuration for registering a service proxy |
| 6c | Describe intentions for Consul Connect service mesh |
| 6d | Check intentions in both the Consul CLI and UI |
| 7 | Secure agent communication |
|---|---|
| 7a | Understanding Consul security/threat model |
| 7b | Differentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption |
| 7c | Understand the different TLS encryption settings for a fully secure datacenter |
| 8 | Secure services with basic access control lists (ACL) |
|---|---|
| 8a | Set up and configure a basic ACL system |
| 8b | Create policies |
| 8c | Manage token lifecycle: multiple policies, token revoking, ACL roles, service identities |
| 8d | Perform a CLI request using a token |
| 8e | Perform an API request using a token |
| 9 | Use gossip encryption |
|---|---|
| 9a | Understanding the Consul security/threat model |
| 9b | Configure gossip encryption for the existing data center |
| 9c | Manage the lifecycle of encryption keys |