HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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)

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Common mistakes

• ✕Studying from 002 or 003 material. The retired exams teach commands and patterns that 004 no longer treats as correct — taint being the clearest example.
• ✕Reaching for count when the scenario describes resources that get added and removed. Changing a count re-indexes everything after it; for_each does not.
• ✕Underestimating state. It is where most real Terraform pain lives, and the exam reflects that.
• ✕Confusing terraform plan's output symbols — create, update in place, destroy and replace each have distinct consequences.
• ✕Treating provisioners as a normal tool. HashiCorp documents them as a last resort, and the exam expects you to know why.
• ✕Ignoring HCP Terraform because you only use the CLI. It is one of the eight published objectives.

Exam-day tips

• ✓Sixty minutes is short. Do not stall on any single item.
• ✓Read code snippets for the one line that differs between options rather than tracing the whole configuration.
• ✓When two answers both work, prefer the one that keeps state consistent and avoids destroying resources.
• ✓Watch for questions describing team workflows — those are usually pointing at remote state and locking.
• ✓Answer everything. There is no published penalty for a wrong answer, and a blank certainly scores nothing.
• ✓If a question mentions a version, check whether the behaviour it describes still applies in 1.12.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (Not published by HashiCorp) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.