Consul Associate Certification Exam Review

»About the Certification Exam

The Consul Associate certification is for Cloud Engineers specializing in security, development, networking, or operations who know the basic concepts, skills, and use cases associated with open source HashiCorp Consul. Candidates will be best prepared for this exam if they have professional experience using Consul in production, but performing the exam objectives in a personal demo environment may also be sufficient. This person understands what enterprise features exist and what can and cannot be done using the open source offering.

»Prerequisites

• Containerization
• Basic terminal skills
• Networking skills including load balancing and distributed systems
• Understand the purpose of ACLs
• Experience with TLS certificate lifecycle

To learn more about the exam, visit the HashiCorp Product Certifications page.

»Preparing for the Exam

Below are sample exam questions, and a review guide. The review guide will help you quickly find information relevant to exam objectives and review that material before taking the exam. The sample questions give you a feel for the type of questions and format of the exam.

»Sample Exam Questions

The exam consists of multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false, and other question types. Below are some examples so you can familiarize yourself with the exam format.

»1) Which protocol(s) need to be enabled in your network configuration to permit the nodes to communicate over the gossip protocol?

✅ TCP and UDP
❌ gRPC
❌ SSL
❌ HTTP and HTTPS
❌ All of the above

»2) What are the benefits of using the Consul Enterprise feature of adding non-voting servers in a redundancy zone to your Consul datacenter? Choose two correct answers.

✅ Read-scalability
✅ Redundancy
❌ Increase quorum
❌ Segment your network
❌ Disaster recovery

»3) You can query for services using the following HTTP API call.

$ curl http://localhost:8500/v1/catalog/service/web

The following response is returned:

[
  {
    "ID": "82f64bfa-22c2-5727-0f5d-0bae376f6584",
    "Node": "Judiths-MBP.lan",
    "Address": "127.0.0.1",
    "Datacenter": "dc1",
    "TaggedAddresses": {
      "lan": "127.0.0.1",
      "wan": "127.0.0.1"
    },
    "NodeMeta": {
      "consul-network-segment": ""
    },
    "ServiceKind": "",
    "ServiceID": "web",
    "ServiceName": "web",
    "ServiceTags": ["rails"],
    "ServiceAddress": "",
    "ServiceWeights": {
      "Passing": 1,
      "Warning": 1
    },
    "ServiceMeta": {},
    "ServicePort": 80,
    "ServiceEnableTagOverride": false,
    "ServiceProxyDestination": "",
    "ServiceProxy": {},
    "ServiceConnect": {},
    "CreateIndex": 10,
    "ModifyIndex": 10
  }
]

You want to retrieve a list of healthy instances of the service. Fill in the blank in the following command:

curl http://localhost:8500/v1/health/service/web______

❌ ?healthy
❌ ?valid-only
❌ ?available=true
✅ ?passing
❌ ?failing=false

»Review Guide

Here is a direct mapping of each HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate exam objective to where it is covered in HashiCorp's documentation, training, or interactive labs through Katacoda. This provides experienced exam candidates a place to review just the objectives they need extra help with before taking the exam.