HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Online Course

HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Online Course

Course Overview

This online course is designed to help you master HashiCorp Consul, covering everything from its core architecture to real-world deployment practices. You’ll gain a solid understanding of service discovery, network automation, and service mesh, while also preparing to pass the Consul Associate certification exam with confidence.

Throughout the course, you'll explore key features such as backup and restore procedures, registering service proxies, and securing communication between agents using Access Control Lists (ACLs).

Skills You’ll Gain

• Deploy and manage a single data center
• Register services using Consul’s service discovery mechanism
• Use Consul’s Key/Value (KV) store for configuration and data management
• Secure communication with gossip encryption
• Back up and restore Consul data
• Implement basic ACLs to control access

What You’ll Learn

• Fundamentals of network automation and service discovery
• Differences between voting and non-voting servers
• How to add or remove Consul agents from a cluster
• Monitor changes using Consul Watch
• Manage service mesh intentions to control service-to-service communication
• Perform CLI operations using authentication tokens

Course Details

• Duration: 8 hours 25 minutes
• Language: English
• Category: Cloud & Networking
• Focus Areas: IT Certification, Service Mesh, Network Automation
• Tools Used: HashiCorp Vault (Beginner)

Course Outline

The HashiCorp Certified Consul Associate Online Course overs the following topis - 

Objective 1: Explain Consul Architecture

• Introduction to HashiCorp Consul.
• Service Discovery, Service Mesh, and Network Automation.
• Basic Consul Architecture and Consensus Protocol (Raft).
• Gossip Protocol (Serf), Network Traffic, and Ports.
• Consul High Availability, Scaling, and Redundancy Zones.
• Voting vs. Non-Voting Servers, and Consul Autopilot.

Objective 2: Deploy a Single Datacenter

• Starting and managing the Consul process.
• Configuring networking and adding/removing Consul Agents.
• Lab sessions on starting the Consul process and agent configuration.

Objective 3: Register Services and Use Service Discovery

• Registering a Consul service and creating service definitions.
• Configuring service health checks and prepared queries.
• Lab sessions on service definition, registration, and health checks.

Objective 4: Access the Consul Key/Value (KV)

• Introduction to Consul K/V store and interacting with it.
• Monitoring changes using Consul Watch and envconsul.
• Lab sessions on working with Consul K/V and using consul-template.

Objective 5: Backup and Restore

• Introduction to Consul snapshots and using them.
• Lab sessions on Consul snapshots and using the Consul Snapshot Agent (Enterprise).

Objective 6: Register a Service Proxy

• Introduction to Consul Service Mesh and registering a service proxy.
• Managing Consul Service Mesh Intentions.
• Lab sessions on service mesh and service proxy registration.

Objective 7: Secure Agent Communication

• Consul security/threat model and required certificates.
• TLS encryption settings.

Objective 8: Secure Services with Basic ACLs

• Introduction to the Consul ACL system.
• Creating ACL policies and managing ACL tokens.
• Performing UI, CLI, and API tasks using tokens.
• Lab sessions on configuring and using ACLs.

Objective 9: Use Gossip Encryption

• Introduction to gossip encryption and configuring it.
• Managing the lifecycle of encryption keys.
• Lab sessions on gossip encryption and managing encryption keys.