Introduction 

I got the Certified Terraform Associate to validate my Terraform skills in terms of provisioning cloud assets for penetration testing. In general I’ve used these skills on other cloud engineering projects and deployment of infra across different cloud providers. I found out the certificate was only around $70 and wanted to get something to validate my skills and knowledge. It took me two weeks to study for the exam and was relatively easy to get.  

Official HashiCorp Training and Others

I started with some of the official training and tutorials to prep for the exam directly from the HashiCorp site here:

https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials

The training had a mix of videos, documentation and some labs, but I honestly had a hard time following some of them. I didn’t like that the code blocks were all over the place, it was a bunch of code snippets that were part of different files and I had a hard time visualizing how everything was glued together. So I ended up buying a Udemy course here:

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate 003 – Hands-On Labs(Content is consistently updated to latest exam version)
https://www.udemy.com/course/terraform-hands-on-labs

The Udemy video training was pretty good, they broke down a lot of the concepts and went through all the different Terraform blocks of code and how they all worked together with the main.tf files and others. There’s a few core moving parts to be aware of, but learning to use terraform is easy – you can get things up and running on your AWS account within 15 minutes, but it helps to be familiar with cloud concepts before taking the training and exam.

Exam Difficulty

This exam was relatively easy to pass, it’s a multiple choice exam with some scenarios and questions on Terraform concepts. I don’t consider myself an expert on ALL Terraform concepts, I only know enough to get by at work and to actually get stuff setup and working. This is considered an entry level exam, but if you are starting from scratch and want to have some motivation to learn some new IaC(Infrastructure as Code) skills, this exam with the training will absolutely help you automate setting up cloud infrastructure for various situations, whether it’s for DevOps or Penetration testing, IMO this is still worth considering if you want to learn some extra skills to make your workflow even better.

Conclusion

I’d recommend getting this cert if you are starting out on your career and even if you are already working professionally, there is a lot of utility to being able to setup your infra with Terraform scripts. On the security side, you can easily understand where things are at ie credentials and sensitive info stored on Terraform scripts, so if you are doing a CTF or even doing a security assessment, you can check a client’s Terraform configs to see if there is anything that could compromise their company.

Knowing Terraform will help you understand the underlying blueprint of a company’s cloud infra, and that can help you suggest recommendations on improving their security and even identifying vulnerable configs in their files. In conclusion, I highly recommend this if you are seeking to expand your skills in cloud engineering, DevSecOps or security.