The Hashicorp Terraform exam is relatively new and gives you official recognition as a Terraform associate. Most important facts on this :

• costs 70,50$ + VAT, online-proctored
• has 57 questions, duration is set to 1 hour, multiple-choice and text questions
• requires 70% (or 40 out of 57) correct answers correctly answered questions to pass

Details can be found here. There is also a small set of example questions, that reflect the difficulty level of the actual exam quite well.

I had worked on a larger AWS landing-zone end of last year and have used Terraform in production a lot. With everybody telling that the exam is rather easy I thought I’d give it a shot without any preparation except for revisiting the code I’ve written and worked with during the landing-zone project. Hashicorp is about to launch a line of professional-level certifications soon as well. My motivation was to have the associate one in case it is a prerequisite for taking on the professional ones.

I took the online proctored exam. Difficulty of the exam was definitely a bit below what you can expect from an associate level certification exam. If you have developed and deployed with TF you’re probably good to go and pass with ease. I passed the exam with 52 out of 57 correct answers and had about 30 minutes of time left.

Most questions were about how resource blocks work or on how to use the most common TF commands and workflows. There where also a lot of questions on how state is handled and on how providers work. Only a few questions dealt with more advanced topics such as state modification and using workspaces. There were also a bunch of questions regarding Hashicorps enterprise and cloud offering which you’d probably get right after reading the product page.

If you’ve written IaC using TF and deployed, updated and destroyed infrastructure I’d recommend to revisit your past project and just take the exam without too much preparation. Well, maybe get to know the Enterprise for those extra points. If you’re new to TF it would be probably best to learn it by creating a small project and read some >0.12 code while following the official documentation and review-guide.

There are also some mock exams available on Udemy which seem to be pretty much spot on to the real thing. Didn’t take them but heard good things.