Note A new version of the Consul Associate certification is coming in 2024. Learn more.

HashiCorp Networking Automation Certification

Cloud engineers can use the Consul Associate certification exam from HashiCorp to verify their basic networking automation skills.

HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (002)

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 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 Community offering. Visit the HashiCorp Certification Exam Portal 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 1.8 or higher

Preparing for the exam

You will be tested based on the objectives below. The Consul Associate exam has both a study guide and a review guide. While much of the information in these two guides are the same, they are presented differently for different uses. Use the study guide if you want to study all the exam objectives. Use 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.

Renewing your Consul Associate certification

To renew your Consul Associate certification, you will need to take and pass the Consul Associate exam.

If you hold an unexpired Consul Associate certification: You can take the exam again starting 18 months after your previous exam date. When you pass the exam, the expiration date on your credentials will be extended.

If you hold an expired Consul Associate certification: You are eligible to recertify at any time. When you pass the exam again, you will receive a new, separate set of credentials with a new expiration date.

Exam details

Assessment Type Multiple choice
Format Online proctored
Duration 1 hour
Price $70.50 USD
plus locally applicable taxes and fees
Free retake not included
Language English
Expiration 2 years

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