If you are thinking about HashiCorp’s Consul Associate certification, you are on the right career track. Certification can help check your ability in a specific technology for a raise, your next role, or to prove to your qualities that you have reached a level to call yourself efficient.
With Hashicorp products, until recently, the seemingly simple task in cloud engineering would have been impossible. There were no certifications. While word-of-mouth about a candidate’s expertise can go a long way to get him to the next role, it’s hard to prove one’s ability to perform at that level for more advanced challenges. Here comes the need to get certified.
Who Should Take the Consul Associate Exam?
The Consul Associate Certification is ideal for Site Reliability Engineers, DevOps professionals, Solutions Architects, or other Cloud Engineers with the basic concepts and technologies to build, secure, and maintain open-source HashiCorp Consul.
Candidates can be best prepared for the exam if they have professional experience using Consul in production, but performing the exam objectives in a personal demo situation may also be sufficient. The person understands what enterprise features exist and cannot be done using the open-source offering.
Is There Any Prerequisite to Take the Consul Associate Exam?
The consul associate should have knowledge like-
- Containerization knowledge
- Basic terminal skills
- Understand the purpose of ACLs
- Networking skills including load balancing and distributed systems.
- Experience with TLS certificate lifecycle
Topics Covered under the Consul Associate Certification:
- Use gossip encryption
- Secure services with basic access control lists (ACL)
- Secure agent communication
- Use Consul service mesh
- Back up and restore
- Access the Consul key/value (KV)
- Register services and use service discovery
- Deploy a single datacenter
- Explain Consul architecture
What Is the Preparation Strategy?
Start with the Registration Process:
Every exam journey should start with registration. A candidate needs to have a verified account with Hashicorp, you will also need to activate the account when logging into your certification section. Buy your Consul associate exam token to appear for the exam and schedule a date for the exam.
Hashicorp asks that during these times of difficulty to show some patience when applying for your consul associate exam as there may be some delay in finding a proctor at the times you wish. So, before jumping into preparation, take the time to register and confirm your exam center, time, and schedule.
Focus on the Consul Associate Syllabus Topics:
For any exam preparation grasping the syllabus, topics is essential. You can plan a schedule and cover each section, one after another. A candidate must cover each syllabus section, and he must go through the following areas while studying for the exam.
- Understand the main features of Consul service mesh (service discovery, health checking, etc.
- Check the components of the Consul datacenter, including agents and communication protocols.
- Explore the available Consul CLI commands.
- Discuss the process of leader election among servers, including the communication protocol that supports the methods.
- Differentiate between Consul agent roles and the different roles that come with them.
- Know the commands to set up a single development agent. Check the commands that do not rely on the presence of multiple agents to complete.
- Know that Consul should run as a daemon/service.
- Be aware that service definitions in the config directory require a Consul agent reload for new files and updates.
- Summarize how Consul compiles a list of registered services in the catalog which can be discovered using the DNS or HTTP interfaces.
Make an Exam Schedule for the Consul Associate Exam:
When you have a schedule for the exam, most likely you can manage the preparation with ease. Fix a study time, and devote at least two hours to daily study. Only making a schedule does not help, you should follow it regularly to attain success.
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Discover the Exam Structure to Face It Better:
The exam mainly comprises multiple-choice and true/false type questions. There are type-in-the-command and UI-based questions too in the exam. Some of the multiple-choice questions are scenario-based questions to test a candidate’s knowledge of Consul usages. The exam gives you one hour time and you should attain 57 questions to pass the exam.
Practice Enough to Pass the Consul Associate Exam:
Practicing is always a great preparation source for IT exams. When it is a challenging exam with 57 questions within one hour, the importance of practicing is way more. If you practice continuously and get familiar with the exam pattern, you will easily face the exam on an actual day. So, take Consul Associate practice exams, score well, and boost your confidence.
Bottom Line:
Holders of the HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate certification know the basic concepts and skills to build, secure and maintain open-source HashiCorp Consul. They understand and can use Consul according to the certification objectives. Additionally, they understand why enterprises choose to extend Consul Open Source with Consul Enterprise to meet critical business objectives. Getting a certification is undoubtedly beneficial to move you ahead in your cloud engineer career.
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