Prep time: I personally spent three weeks and would recommend around a month for most cases.
Recommended resources: HashiCorp’s Learning Path - Terraform Associate (003), KodeKloud’s Terraform material, and Bryan Krausen’s practice exams on Udemy.
Exam difficulty: Not bad with proper preparation. Questions are multiple choice/multiple response only.
Before I learned about Terraform, I remember hearing about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef. Even Microsoft Server’s own DSC (Desired State Config). Around the time I learned about these tools, I was either still in university or I had just started my first job out of school as a systems administrator. These tools felt daunting to learn and easy to misuse, yet undeniably the future of the profession.
Terraform is the #1 IaC tool on the market. HashiCorp has also expanded to offer other services that synergize well with Terraform. Funny enough, IBM recently acquired HashiCorp. They also previously acquired Red Hat, which maintains Ansible. I doubt they will ever converge, but clearly IBM is betting big on IaC.
Terraform has never been more relevant, and mastery of it is a fantastic investment. Getting started on this journey with the official HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification is in my opinion the clear first step.
Go through HashiCorp’s official Terraform Associate learning path first. The material is very comprehensive. If it feels overwhelming, then don’t stress about taking a bunch of notes. Maybe just jot down what seems like the most pertinent information. They offer their own lab environments as well. I would highly recommend doing all of them. I would also recommend KodeKloud, but only if you are looking to pick up several DevOps certifications. They offer a good deal if you pay for a year as opposed to a month (like almost everyone else).
The one thing that I think if border-line non-negotiable are the Udemy practice exams by Bryan Krausen. These prepared me for the exam more than anything. I find that the practice exams are consistently the most helpful thing with every certification I get, and there is no exception here. The style of questions are very similar to what will appear on the real thing.
From start to finish, this only took me about three weeks. I spent the most time going through their official study guide, and then spent about five days going through the KodeKloud course and another five days going through the Udemy practice tests.
I don’t think that anyone should have to spend more than a month preparing as long as they can dedicate at least an hour per day. The exam isn’t too bad.
The format is multiple choice/multiple response. All mostly straightforward, too. I felt like there was a significant lack of “gotchas” compared to the AWS exams. I think that the two most important things to know well before registering for the exam is to know the in-scope commands very well and also have a deep understanding of the core Terraform workflow.
I personally hate taking exams at home. I go to a nearby testing center whenever possible. That being said, Terraform only offers their exams online. Be aware of this before you get started in case it could be an issue!
Before the year is up, I want to earn both Mirantis Certified Docker Associate and AWS CloudOps Engineer. Containers, container orchestration, and public clouds are never found far from Terraform out there. The most desired skills in Site Reliability Engineer/DevOps Engineer job postings almost all include Docker, Terraform, Azure/AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, and strong scripting experience in Go/Python/Ruby. I would recommend prioritizing those skills.