How to prepare for HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Exam?

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How to prepare for HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Exam?

HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate certification on your job resume will undoubtedly catch the attention of potential employers. Everyone in the HashiCorp Networking Automation domain understands the importance of the Consul-Associate certification exam. Without a doubt, the HashiCorp Consul-Associate exam gives you complete authority and the opportunity to improve your skillset through the power of vision. So, after passing the HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate exam, you’ll be ready to tackle the more complex issues. Allow us to guide you through the process of preparation journey for acing the exam!

About HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Exam

The HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate certification is intended for Site Reliability Engineers, Solutions Architects, DevOps professionals, and other Cloud Engineers who are familiar with the basic concepts and skills required to build, secure, and maintain open-source HashiCorp Consul. Candidates with professional experience using Consul in production are the best candidates for this exam. However, completing the exam objectives in a personal demo environment may suffice. Overall, this certification validates a person’s understanding of enterprise features and what can and cannot be done with open-source software.

Prerequisites

  • To begin, understand containerization.
  • Terminal fundamentals
  • Load balancing and distributed systems are examples of networking skills.
  • Recognize the function of ACLs
  • Finally, familiarity with the TLS certificate lifecycle

Exam Format

Before you begin studying, you should be familiar with all of the exam details. This keeps you up to date and gives you a better idea of how to proceed with your preparation based on the type of questions asked and the time allotted. As a result, we’ve compiled the following vital information about the HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate exam:

  • Multiple-choice questions – the type of questions.
  • English is the exam language.
  • 1-hour time limit
  • Proctored online examination

Let us now jump into the course outline of the exam –

HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Course Outline

The syllabus has been divided into the following sections and subsections:

1 Explain Consul architecture

  • Identify the components of the Consul datacenter, including agents and communication protocols
  • Prepare Consul for high availability and performance
  • Identify Consul’s core functionality
  • Differentiate agent roles

2 Deploy a single datacenter

  • Start and manage the Consul process
  • Interpret a Consul agent configuration
  • Configure Consul network addresses and ports
  • Describe and configure agent join and leave behaviors

3  Register services and use service discovery

  • Interpret a service registration
  • also, Differentiate ways to register a single service
  • furthermore, Interpret a service configuration with a health check
  • moreover, Check the service catalog status from the output of the DNS/API interface or via the Consul UI
  • also, Interpret a prepared query
  • furthermore, Use a prepared query

4 Access the Consul key/value (KV)

  • Understand the capabilities and limitations of the KV store
  • also, Interact with the KV store using both the Consul CLI and UI
  • furthermore, Monitor KV changes using watch
  • moreover, Monitor KV changes using envconsul and consul-template

5 Back up and restore

  • Describe the content of a snapshot
  • also, Back up and restore the datacenter
  • [Enterprise] Describe the benefits of snapshot agent features

6 Use Consul service mesh

  • Understand Consul Connect service mesh high-level architecture
  • also, Describe the configuration for registering a service proxy
  • furthermore, Describe intentions for the Consul Connect service mesh
  • moreover, Check intentions in both the Consul CLI and UI

7 Secure agent communication

  • Understanding Consul security/threat model
  • Differentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption
  • Understand the different TLS encryption settings for a fully secure datacenter

8 Secure services with basic access control lists (ACL)

  • Set up and configure a basic ACL system
  • Create policies
  • Manage token lifecycle: multiple policies, token revoking, ACL roles, service identities
  • Perform a CLI request using a token
  • Perform an API request using a token

9 Use gossip encryption

  • Understanding the Consul security/threat model
  • Configure gossip encryption for the existing data center
  • Manage the lifecycle of encryption keys

Difficulty Level of the Exam

The HashiCorp Consul-Associate questions are far from easy. Acquiring through the Consul-Associate exam is undoubtedly the most difficult task to complete. The consul-Associate exam is the most popular among HashiCorp certifications. HashiCorp Networking Automation Consul Associate professionals are more likely to go through the Consul-Associate training material and have their skills and abilities validated with the appropriate level of work. The Consul-Associate certificate would provide you with opportunities to participate in the organization’s growth at the same time.

Let’s take a look at some study materials that will help you ace the exam in one sitting –

Study Resources

  • If you want to cover all of the exam objectives, use the study guide. If you already have Consul experience and/or training and want to pick and choose which objectives to review before taking the exam, use the review guide.
  • To understand the basic structure of CLI, read the Overview section of the Consul Commands (CLI) documentation.
  • Consul Reference Architecture should be followed. This guide’s goal is to recommend HashiCorp Consul deployment practices. This reference architecture conveys a general architecture that should be modified to meet the unique requirements of each implementation.
  • There are also sample questions available to give you a taste of what the exam will be like.
  • Practice testsThe final and most important step in preparation is to practice questions. This has two advantages: it not only allows you to assess your level of preparation, but it also allows you to boost your confidence by attempting difficult questions. The practice tests provided by Testpreptraining.com are unquestionably reliable and sufficient for exam preparation. We offer unique sets of questions designed by professionals to help you practice and sweep smoothly.

Final Words

Another factor to consider before beginning is understanding the exam pattern, which includes information such as the type and number of questions, as well as the time allotted. This will assist you in strategizing your learning technique as well as managing your time while taking the exam. Also, make an effort to practice as much as possible!

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