Terraform Associate study guide
Terraform Associate · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
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 study guide has 8 sections and about 2,469 words.
01Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
Infrastructure as Code means you describe the desired end state of your infrastructure in files, commit those files to version control, and let a tool reconcile reality with the description. Terraform is declarative and idempotent : you state what you want, not the sequence of API calls to get there.
301 words, about 2 min02Terraform fundamentals
The terraform binary is a single executable containing Terraform core : the HCL parser, graph builder, state manager and plan/apply engine. Everything that talks to an API lives in providers - plugins downloaded by terraform init into .terraform/providers (or a configured plugin cache directory).
303 words, about 2 min03Core Terraform workflow
terraform init → terraform fmt / validate → terraform plan → terraform apply → eventually terraform destroy . init initializes the working directory: downloads providers and child modules, writes .terraform.lock.hcl , and configures the backend.
289 words, about 1 min04Terraform configuration
HCL provides variable blocks ( type , default , description , validation , sensitive , nullable ), locals , output , expressions (conditionals, for expressions, splats, string templates) and built-in functions such as lookup , merge , cidrsubnet , try , can and coalesce . count (integer), for each (map or set of strings), depends on , provider , and lifecycle { create before destroy, prevent destroy, ignore changes, replace triggered by } .
295 words, about 1 min05Terraform modules
Any directory of .tf files is a module. The directory you run Terraform in is the root module ; anything invoked with a module block is a child module .
304 words, about 2 min06Terraform state management
State maps each resource address to a real object's identifier and caches its attributes. Without it Terraform cannot tell whether to create or update.
331 words, about 2 min07Maintain infrastructure with Terraform
Maintaining infrastructure means handling drift, upgrades, refactors and partial failures without destroying data. Drift - real infrastructure changed outside Terraform.
302 words, about 2 min08HCP Terraform
HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud; Terraform Enterprise is the self-hosted equivalent) is HashiCorp's managed platform that runs Terraform remotely and stores state, adding shared run history, policy enforcement, team permissions and a private module/provider registry. Using Terraform CLI locally does not require it, and a free tier exists.
344 words, about 2 min