Terraform Associate case studies
Terraform Associate · Put your knowledge to work in context.
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004) is a foundational, entry-level credential that verifies you can use Terraform to describe and manage infrastructure as code. HashiCorp positions it for cloud engineers who have foundational Terraform knowledge and skills and who can identify Terraform Enterprise features and distinguish them from the Community edition. The Terraform Associate case studies are 5 cases and about 3,774 words.
1Two Applies, One State File
A six-person platform team runs about 140 AWS resources from one root module with an S3 backend and DynamoDB state locking. CI applies on every merge to main, but engineers also apply from laptops for hotfixes.
810 words, about 4 min2One Root Module, Three Workspaces, Forty Resources
A team's whole AWS footprint - VPC, ECS, RDS, 40+ resources - lives in a single 2,400-line root module, selected by terraform workspace for dev, staging and prod. Environment differences are expressed inline: count = terraform.workspace == "prod" ?
703 words, about 4 min3Renaming Twelve Instances Without a Midnight Outage
} , behind an ALB whose target group attachments also use count = 12 and element(aws instance.web[ ].id, count.index) . Three changes are queued: rename the resource block from web to app , give each instance a Name tag that includes its availability zone, and shrink the fleet to eleven for cost reasons.
757 words, about 4 min4Moving Four Workspaces to Remote Runs
Acme runs four HCP Terraform workspaces in one organization: network, dev, staging, prod. All four use CLI-driven runs with local execution today, so engineers run terraform apply on laptops while state and variables live in HCP Terraform.
726 words, about 4 min5Fourteen Minute Plans and a Forty Terabyte Import
A team manages roughly 900 resources across three root modules sharing one S3 backend, on Terraform 1.6 with hashicorp/aws pinned at ~ 4.0 . A full plan against prod takes fourteen minutes, so engineers have started running terraform plan -target=module.app -refresh=false before every PR, and one engineer has applied with -target twice this month.
778 words, about 4 min