Networking
Automation Certification
Pass the Consul Associate certification exam to validate your networking automation skills.
Consul Associate (002)
The Consul Associate Certification is for Site Reliability Engineers, Solutions Architects, DevOps professionals, or other Cloud Engineers who know the basic concepts and skills to build, secure, and maintain open source HashiCorp Consul. This includes understanding what enterprise features exist and what can and cannot be done using the open source offering. You will be best prepared for this exam if you have professional experience using Consul in production, but performing the exam objectives in a personal demo environment may be sufficient.
Consul Associate (002) Details
- Containerization knowledge
- Basic terminal skills
- Networking skills including load balancing and distributed systems
- Understand the purpose of ACLs
- Experience with TLS certificate lifecycle
| Assessment Type | Multiple choice |
| Format | Online proctored |
| Duration | 1 hour |
| Price | $70.50 USD, plus locally applicable taxes and fees. Free retake not included. |
| Language | English |
| Expiration | 2 years |
| 1 | Explain Consul architecture |
|---|---|
| 1a | Identify the components of Consul datacenter, including agents and communication protocols |
| 1b | Prepare Consul for high availability and performance |
| 1c | Identify Consul's core functionality |
| 1d | Differentiate agent roles |
| 2 | Deploy a single datacenter |
|---|---|
| 2a | Start and manage the Consul process |
| 2b | Interpret a Consul agent configuration |
| 2c | Configure Consul network addresses and ports |
| 2d | Describe and configure agent join and leave behaviors |
| 3 | Register services and use service discovery |
|---|---|
| 3a | Interpret a service registration |
| 3b | Differentiate ways to register a single service |
| 3c | Interpret a service configuration with health check |
| 3d | Check the service catalog status from the output of the DNS/API interface or via the Consul UI |
| 3e | Interpret a prepared query |
| 3f | Use a prepared query |
| 4 | Access the Consul key/value (KV) |
|---|---|
| 4a | Understand the capabilities and limitations of the KV store |
| 4b | Interact with the KV store using both the Consul CLI and UI |
| 4c | Monitor KV changes using watch |
| 4d | Monitor KV changes using envconsul and consul-template |
| 5 | Back up and restore |
|---|---|
| 5a | Describe the content of a snapshot |
| 5b | Back up and restore the datacenter |
| 5c | [Enterprise] Describe the benefits of snapshot agent features |
| 6 | Use Consul service mesh |
|---|---|
| 6a | Understand Consul Connect service mesh high level architecture |
| 6b | Describe configuration for registering a service proxy |
| 6c | Describe intentions for Consul Connect service mesh |
| 6d | Check intentions in both the Consul CLI and UI |
| 7 | Secure agent communication |
|---|---|
| 7a | Understanding Consul security/threat model |
| 7b | Differentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption |
| 7c | Understand the different TLS encryption settings for a fully secure datacenter |
| 8 | Secure services with basic access control lists (ACL) |
|---|---|
| 8a | Set up and configure a basic ACL system |
| 8b | Create policies |
| 8c | Manage token lifecycle: multiple policies, token revoking, ACL roles, service identities |
| 8d | Perform a CLI request using a token |
| 8e | Perform an API request using a token |
| 9 | Use gossip encryption |
|---|---|
| 9a | Understanding the Consul security/threat model |
| 9b | Configure gossip encryption for the existing data center |
| 9c | Manage the lifecycle of encryption keys |
Visit the Exam-taker Handbook to learn about the requirements and policies for taking exams.
To renew your Consul Associate certification, you will need to take and pass the Consul Associate exam.
If you hold an unexpired Consul Associate certification: You can take the exam again starting 18 months after your previous exam date. When you pass the exam, the expiration date on your credentials will be extended.
If you hold an expired Consul Associate certification: You are eligible to recertify at any time. When you pass the exam again, you will receive a new, separate set of credentials with a new expiration date.
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