As someone who recently passed the Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional certification exam, I wanted to share my experience and provide some insights for future exam takers. Although the certification requirements specify that you should consider looking at the Terraform associate certification before attempting this, I know of folks who took it alongside me at HashiConf'24 and passed it without doing the associate exam. Keep in mind that the person I am referring to had extensive experience maintaining infrastructure components and EKS configurations using Terraform at his organizations. So your mileage may vary as they say.

Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional certification , or TF Pro certification, is a 4 hr certification with a mix of 12 multiple choice questions and 4 lab based practice exams.

• Terraform version : v1.6.0
• Focus areas( from the certification details page):
  • Experience using the Terraform AWS Provider in a production environment
  • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Certification (recommended)
  • Linux skills, such as the ability to list and edit files via command terminal
  • Experience using cloud credentials
  • Familiarity with YAML, JSON, HCL, and CSV formats
  • Understanding of the networking stack and networking protocols, including TCP/IP and UDP
  • Advanced configuration authoring and a deep understanding of Terraform workflows

My experience

• Focused on AWS:

  • The certification exam is currently focussed on deploying AWS workloads. It would help to know some of the common AWS resources and the AWS provider registry documentation ( though they would give you the links for all relevant resources you need to use).
  • Search within the AWS provider registry documentation is permitted.
  • Resources to know or have awareness around. There is a random_integer resource in that list :)

• Learning path:

  • I recommend the following for preparation, though as the exam requirements states "Nothing beats your real world experience with Terraform".
    • Official Prep
    • Study Guide from Mattias Fjellström who was kind enough to write this to have a focussed guide around what to expect. I think I bought the guide a minute after it was published in leanpub. Absolutely worth it !!!
  • Know your imports, modules and terraform functions to work with files.
  • Refactoring is one place in the documentation I spent a lot of time on my daily work and it does help a lot with the labs.

• Exam interface:

  • If you have sat for the Vault Professional certification or Certified Kubernetes exams, you would have some familiarity with the type of interfaces to expect.
  • I would recommend taking a look at this Webinar from Gary Larizza about the lab environments and what to expect from a Professional-level exam. It is not focussed on the Terraform certification, but does call out some things which are relevant.
  • You have a VSCode IDE, a terminal and a browser to work with. The copy paste commands are the ones you would need to get used to. It did take a couple of attempts to get a feel of it without a keyboard or mouse at HashiConf'24.
  • I had my exam interface freeze out on me couple of times and not recognizing my inputs. I could get back to the interface pressing the escape & maximize buttons which sort of makes you go out of the exam interface and let you back in. I somehow feel it might be an issue with a virtual proctored exams who can be a lot more stricter when you go out of focus from the exam areas.

• Multiple choice questions:

  • Keep in mind that you have access to the documentation even on the multiple choice questions. I spent almost 20 mins before realizing it and I would have probably finished it before if I realized it sooner.
  • Search within the documentation is not permitted and you would be thrown into a blocked page notification. You could select any of the available links on the left hand pane from the link you have, provided they are allowed to be used for the exam.

• Lab based scenarios:

  • Each lab task had a few sections.
    • Initial context about what the scenario is.
    • The tasks. YES, tasks. You would have multiple tasks(3-4) within each one of these lab based questions.
    • Validation sections which help you validate what you have done is right. Do run these as you could have even named things differently from the expected results.
    • Complete the sections to the point you are able to. I did leave a couple of those as my outputs from functions weren't what I was expecting.
    • The questions didn't seem like in any order of complexity. I would recommend skimming through the questions once to see if it is something you could attempt easily compared to spending a lot more time on. I personally feel a lot more confident with anything where I don't have to deal with functions. :)
  • Available Documentation & Links
    • Every task has a set of links for the Terraform documentation, AWS provider documentation etc on the right hand pane. Open the links as you start with a lab as you would need them. I spent a lot more time on the first scenario scrolling up and down figuring out which link to open for what task.

• Additional info:

  • You can request for a 30 min extension from certiverse if English is your second language.

Remember, every exam experience can be slightly different, but I hope these notes from my experience will help you prepare better for the Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional certification exam. Good luck!

References:

• Certification details
• Official Prep
• Study Guide