HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004) exam objectives
HashiCorp publishes 8 exam domains without a percentage split, so balanced coverage across all of them is the safe strategy.
004AssociateIntermediate
1. Terraform state management
- Why state exists, and what breaks without it
- Remote backends, state locking, and why local state fails a team
- Moving and importing resources — terraform state mv, and import blocks
- Reading state safely, and why secrets in state matter
2. Core Terraform workflow
- write → init → plan → apply, and what each step actually does
- Reading a plan and predicting create, update, replace and destroy
- terraform fmt and validate in a real workflow
- Targeted operations and -replace (which supersedes the older taint)
3. Terraform configuration
- Variables, locals, outputs, and precedence when a value is set twice
- Expressions, functions, and dynamic blocks
- count versus for_each — and why for_each is usually safer
- Resource dependencies, implicit and explicit
4. Terraform modules
- Writing and calling modules, with inputs and outputs
- Sourcing from the public registry and from private sources
- Version constraints and why pinning matters
- Structuring a repository so modules stay reusable
5. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform
- What IaC solves — repeatability, review, and drift
- Declarative versus imperative provisioning
- Terraform's multi-cloud, provider-based model
- Idempotency, and what it means for a rerun
6. Terraform fundamentals
- Providers, provider versions, and the dependency lock file
- Installing Terraform and the purpose of terraform init
- Resources versus data sources
- Provisioners, and why they are the last resort
7. Maintain infrastructure with Terraform
- Detecting and reconciling drift
- Upgrading providers and Terraform versions safely
- Refactoring with moved blocks instead of destroy-and-recreate
- Managing resource lifecycle — prevent_destroy, ignore_changes
8. HCP Terraform
- Workspaces, and how remote runs differ from local ones
- Remote state sharing across workspaces
- Policy as code with Sentinel, and the private module registry
- VCS-driven workflows and team access
Our practice exam distributes its questions across these exact domains at these weightings — so your score per domain tells you precisely where you stand.
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