Exam content list - Consul Associate (003)

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Consul

The Consul Associate certification is for cloud engineers specializing in operations, IT, or development who know the basic concepts and skills of HashiCorp Consul. While experience using Consul in production is helpful, performing the exam objectives in a demo environment can be sufficient to pass the exam. The exam expects familiarity with Consul Enterprise features that are not supported by Consul community edition.

This guide lists the specific exam objectives and resources you can study to demonstrate those objectives. Review our learning path for a list of exam objectives and the resources you can use to prepare for the exam. While the tutorials listed may use specific cloud providers to introduce the learning objectives, provider-specific knowledge is not necessary for the exam.

Visit the HashiCorp Security Automation Certification page for information on the exam and to sign up.

Review guide

Below is a direct mapping of each HashiCorp Consul Associate exam objective to a documentation page or tutorial that demonstrates it. Experienced candidates can use this as a reference to focus on the specific objectives they need to review in more detail.


1	Understand the pillars of service networking	Documentation	Tutorial
1a	Understand how Consul discovers, tracks, and monitors the health of services	What is Consul? What is service discovery?	Monitor your application health with distributed checks
1b	Explain how Consul secures service to service communication	What is service mesh? Multi-platform service mesh	Securely connect your services with Consul service mesh: VMs Securely connect your services with Consul service mesh: Kubernetes
1c	Summarize how Consul controls access to services at point of entry	Consul gateways overview Terminating gateway	Access services in your service mesh: Kubernetes Access services in your service mesh: VMs Connect external services to Consul with terminating gateways: Kubernetes
1d	Discuss how Consul automates networking tasks	Network infrastructure automation Consul-Terraform-Sync architecture	Automate your network configuration with CTS Automate reverse proxy configuration with consul-template
2	Describe Consul architecture	Documentation	Tutorial
2a	Identify Consul datacenter components including agents and communication protocols options	Consul architecture Required ports for Consul Glossary of terms	Consul reference architecture
2b	Review Consul server high availability & scalability options	Consul architecture Consensus protocol Server performance requirements	Consul reference architecture Consul deployment guide Provide fault tolerance with redundancy zones
2c	Differentiate between server agents and data plane components (client agents and Consul Dataplane)	Consul architecture Gossip protocol Consul dataplane	Consul reference architecture Consul deployment guide Register your services to Consul: VMs
2d	Understand that Consul can run on multiple platforms	Consul on Kubernetes Consul on multiple platforms Consul dataplane Join Kubernetes Clusters to external Consul Servers Join External Services to Consul on Kubernetes	Deploy Consul on VMs Deploy Consul on Kubernetes
3	Deploy a single datacenter	Documentation	Tutorial
3a	Configure, bootstrap, and start Consul server agents	Agent options Running an agent	Consul deployment guide Deploy Consul on VMs
3b	Configure and start Consul client agents	Bind address Advertise address	Register your services to Consul: VMs
3c	Configure and start Consul on Kubernetes	Install with Helm Install with Consul-K8S CLI Helm chart reference	Deploy Consul on Kubernetes
3d	Explain Consul agent join methods and behavior	Command: `join` Join options Cloud auto-join	Register your services to Consul: VMs Datacenter auto join
4	Register services and use service discovery	Documentation	Tutorial
4a	Interpret a service registration	Services configuration overview Command: services register	Register your services to Consul: VMs Monitor your application health with distributed checks
4b	Differentiate between service registration methods	Services configuration overview Reloadable configuration	Register your services to Consul: VMs
4c	Understand service health check configuration options and behaviors	Health checks API endpoint: `/health`	Monitor your application health with distributed checks
4d	Query Consul's service catalog via CLI, API, UI, and/or DNS, and interpret the results	Command: catalog services Consul DNS overview API endpoint: `/catalog`	Register your services to Consul: VMs
4e	Interpret & use prepared queries	API endpoint: `/query`
5	Use Consul service mesh	Documentation	Tutorial
5a	Consider high level architecture & key benefits of Consul service mesh	Consul service mesh Envoy proxy configuration	Securely connect your services: VMs Securely connect your services: Kubernetes
5b	Understand Consul service mesh intentions & when to use them	Intentions overview	Control traffic communication between services with intentions Control service requests with application-aware intentions
5c	Apply proxy configuration options within Consul service mesh	Consul service mesh Envoy proxy configuration	Securely connect your services: VMs Securely connect your services: Kubernetes
6	Secure agent communication	Documentation	Tutorial
6a	Understand Consul security/threat model	Security model overview Encryption	Consul reference architecture
6b	Differentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption	CA and TLS certificates for Consul agents CA for Consul Connect service mesh Common errors Built-in CA	Production readiness checklist
6c	Interpret TLS encryption settings & intended use	TLS configuration reference `auto_encrypt` `verify_server_hostname` `verify_incoming` `verify_outgoing`
6d	Configure gossip encryption	Encryption system overview Encryption parameters Gossip encryption key rotation Command: `keyring`	Consul deployment guide
7	Secure services with basic access control lists (ACLs)	Documentation	Tutorial
7a	Understand Consul ACL system components and usage	ACL system overview Command: `acl bootstrap`	Manage permissions with ACLs: VMs
7b	Create and configure ACL policies and tokens	ACL rules Command: `acl`) ACL tokens ACL policies ACL roles	Manage permissions with ACLs: VMs
7c	Use ACL tokens to communicate securely with Consul services and agents	`CONSUL_HTTP_TOKEN` Command: `acl token create` Command: `acl set-agent-token`	Manage permissions with ACLs: VMs
8	Secure and connect service mesh applications	Documentation	Tutorial
8a	Use Consul gateways to securely connect and access services into, out of, and within the service mesh	Gateways overview Terminating gateways	Control access into the service mesh with Consul API Gateway: Kubernetes Access services in your mesh: VMs Connect external services to Consul with terminating gateways: Kubernetes
8b	Understand how to enable communication between multiple Consul datacenters	Cluster peering Mesh gateways WAN Federation Between VMs and Kubernetes Through Mesh Gateways	Connect services between Consul datacenters with cluster peering
9	Monitor Consul	Documentation	Resource
9a	Describe Consul service mesh observability	Service mesh observability overview Access logs	Monitor application health and performance with Consul proxy metrics Debug service mesh events and errors with Consul proxy access logs
9b	Review Consul datacenter observability	Audit logging (ENT)	Monitor Consul server health and performance with metrics and logs Capture Consul events with audit logging
10	Operate and maintain Consul	Documentation	Tutorial
10a	Manage Consul servers	Upgrading Consul Automated backups Command: `join` Cloud auto-join	Register your services to Consul: VMs Datacenter auto join
10b	Maintain Consul communications security	Root certificate rotation ACL system overview
10c	Backup and restore Consul cluster state	Automated backups (ENT) Command: `snapshot agent` Command: `snapshot` `data_dir`	Disaster recovery for Consul clusters
10d	Understand Consul datacenter troubleshooting options	Command: `debug` Command: `monitor`

Next steps

Review the learning path to practice all of the exam objectives. Check out the sample questions to review the exam question format.

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