Getting Terraform Certified

The more I work with Terraform, the more I like the idea of IaC and how Terraform is provider agnostic. So much so that I decided to get certified. I thought that would force me to fill the voids in the basics of Terraform. After some weeks of study coupled with hands on usage at work, I passed the certification exam this morning! Although the exam consisted mostly of multiple choice questions, it was not all straight forward rote memorization. I learnt some nuances and cleared up some misconceptions that I had.

• For working with large terraform configurations with lots of resources, it is probably better to slice them up into individual smaller configurations and terraform apply each separately. If it is not trivial to refactor an existing large configuration, refresh=false can be used during terraform to skip syncing with real infrastructure when running terraform apply or terraform plan.
• The difference between local-exec and remote-exec provisioners
• Workspaces do not provide strong separation. If there are multiple deployment environments qa, stage and prod and each might have different resources and specific infrastructure requirements, workspaces may not be the best choice as compared to using separate folders, each containing different confgurations.

Minor annoyances:

• Questions involving Terraform Enterprise and paid stuff.
• Strict physical requirements when taking the proctored exam. Before the exam, I had to use my webcam and do a 360 degree scan of my room and clear my desk of extra items.