TA-004 · HashiCorp
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004)
A tool certification rather than a cloud one — it applies to whichever provider you already use.
A tool certification rather than a cloud one, which makes it the most portable exam in this catalog: it applies to whichever provider you already use, and it stays useful when you change jobs and the provider changes with it. Eight domains - more than any other exam here - covering the core workflow, state management, modules, configuration, and HCP Terraform. Individually none of them is deep. Collectively they are wide, and the failure mode is a candidate who is fluent in plan and apply and has never been asked about state locking or workspace management. The exam fee is $70.50, the lowest of any certification here, so the cost of a resit is not the argument. The argument is time: eight domains is a lot of surface to check by reading, and a per-domain score tells you which of the eight you have actually covered.
Who sits this exam
Anyone writing infrastructure as code. Uniquely portable among the six here: nothing you learn is wasted if your employer moves between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
What it covers
Each domain below is weighted the way the real exam weights it, and scored separately, so you can see which one is holding the total down.
- 01Infrastructure as Code Concepts
- 02Terraform Workflow
- 03Modules and Configuration
- 04State Management
How you will practise
- Review
- Practice with answers explained immediately.
- Section
- Review one domain at a time.
- Timed
- A timed set with results at the end.
- Final
- The full exam simulation — every question, timed.
What passing proves
That you understand Terraform's workflow end to end, and specifically that you can reason about state — which is where most real Terraform incidents actually begin.