HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (002) Practice Exam

HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (002) Practice Exam

The HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (002) certification validates your proficiency in the fundamentals of HashiCorp Consul, an open-source tool for service discovery and orchestration within infrastructure environments. By earning this credential, you demonstrate your ability to leverage Consul's functionalities to effectively manage service registration, health checks, and secure service communication across your infrastructure.

Who Should Take This Exam?

• Cloud Engineers: Aspiring or existing cloud engineers specializing in security, development, or operations, seeking to strengthen their knowledge of service discovery with Consul.
• Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): Individuals working in SRE roles who want to effectively manage and orchestrate services within their infrastructure.
• Network Engineers: Network engineers seeking to understand how Consul can be used for service discovery and network segmentation.
• Operations Professionals: Anyone working with microservices architectures who wants to gain proficiency in using Consul to manage service communication and health.

Are There Prerequisites?

There are no mandatory prerequisites for taking the exam. However, to maximize your success, it's recommended that you possess:

• Basic understanding of cloud computing concepts
• Experience working with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools (familiarity with Terraform is a plus)
• Familiarity with fundamental networking principles

Roles and Responsibilities 

• Implement Service Discovery: Effectively utilize Consul to register and discover services within your infrastructure, enabling efficient communication between applications.
• Configure Health Checks: Learn how to design and implement health checks using Consul to monitor service availability and ensure application functionality.
• Secure Service Communication: Gain knowledge of securing service communication within your infrastructure using Consul's access control lists (ACLs) and other security features.
• Manage Service KV Store: Understand how to leverage Consul's built-in key-value (KV) store for storing and sharing configuration data securely across services.
• Integrate Consul with CI/CD Pipelines: Explore how to integrate Consul with CI/CD pipelines to automate service registration and deployment processes.

Exam Details

• Type of questions: Multiple-choice questions
• Exam Language: English
• Time allotted: 1 hr
• Format: Online Proctored

Course Outline

1 Explain Consul architecture

• Identify the components of Consul datacenter, including agents and communication protocols
• Prepare Consul for high availability and performance
• Identify Consul’s core functionality
• Differentiate agent roles

2 Deploy a single datacenter

• Start and manage the Consul process
• Interpret a Consul agent configuration
• Configure Consul network addresses and ports
• Describe and configure agent join and leave behaviors

3  Register services and use service discovery

• Interpret a service registration
• Differentiate ways to register a single service
• Interpret a service configuration with health check
• Check the service catalog status from the output of the DNS/API interface or via the Consul UI
• Interpret a prepared query
• Use a prepared query

4 Access the Consul key/value (KV)

• Understand the capabilities and limitations of the KV store
• Interact with the KV store using both the Consul CLI and UI
• Monitor KV changes using watch
• Monitor KV changes using envconsul and consul-template

5 Back up and restore

• Describe the content of a snapshot
• Back up and restore the datacenter
• [Enterprise] Describe the benefits of snapshot agent features

6 Use Consul service mesh

• Understand Consul Connect service mesh high level architecture
• Describe configuration for registering a service proxy
• Describe intentions for Consul Connect service mesh
• Check intentions in both the Consul CLI and UI

7 Secure agent communication

• Understanding Consul security/threat model
• Differentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption
• Understand the different TLS encryption settings for a fully secure datacenter

8 Secure services with basic access control lists (ACL)

• Set up and configure a basic ACL system
• Create policies
• Manage token lifecycle: multiple policies, token revoking, ACL roles, service identities
• Perform a CLI request using a token
• Perform an API request using a token

9 Use gossip encryption

• Understanding the Consul security/threat model
• Configure gossip encryption for the existing data center
• Manage the lifecycle of encryption keys