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Networking
Automation Certification

Pass the Consul Associate certification exam to validate your networking automation skills.

HashiCorp Certified:

Consul Associate (003)

Product version tested:Consul 1.15

The Consul Associate Certification is for site reliability engineers (SREs), solutions architects (SAs), DevOps professionals, or other cloud engineers who know the basic concepts and skills to build, secure, and maintain Consul. You understand what Enterprise features exist and can differentiate between Consul Enterprise and Community Edition. 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.

  • Containerization
  • Basic terminal skills
  • Load balancing architecture
  • Distributed systems knowledge
  • Basic security practices knowledge
  • OSI Model familiarity
  • Cloud & Platform awareness (AWS, Google, Azure, Kubernetes, VMs)
Assessment TypeMultiple choice
FormatOnline proctored
Duration1 hour
Price$70.50 USD, plus locally applicable taxes and fees. Free retake not included.
LanguageEnglish
Expiration2 years
1Understand the pillars of service networking
1aUnderstand how Consul discovers, tracks, and monitors the health of services
1bExplain how Consul secures service to service communication
1cSummarize how Consul controls access to services at point of entry
1dDiscuss how Consul automates networking tasks
2Describe Consul architecture
2aIdentify Consul datacenter components including agents and communication protocols
2bReview Consul server high availability & scalability options
2cDifferentiate between server agents and data plane components (client agents and Consul Dataplane)
2dUnderstand that Consul can run on multiple platforms
3Deploy a single datacenter
3aConfigure, bootstrap, and start Consul server agents
3bConfigure and start Consul client agents
3cConfigure and start Consul on Kubernetes
3dExplain Consul agent join methods and behavior
4Register services and use service discovery
4aInterpret a service registration
4bDifferentiate between service registration methods
4cUnderstand service health check configuration options and behaviors
4dQuery Consul's service catalog via CLI, API, UI, and/or DNS, and interpret the results
4eInterpret & use prepared queries
5Use Consul service mesh
5aConsider high level architecture & key benefits of Consul service mesh
5bUnderstand Consul service mesh intentions & when to use them
5cApply proxy configuration options within Consul service mesh
6Secure agent communication
6aUnderstand Consul security/threat model
6bDifferentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption
6cInterpret TLS encryption settings & intended use
6dConfigure gossip encryption
7Secure services with basic access control lists (ACLs)
7aUnderstand Consul ACL system components and usage
7bCreate and configure ACL policies and tokens
7cUse ACL tokens to communicate securely with Consul services and agents
8Secure and connect service mesh applications
8aUse Consul gateways to securely connect and access services into, out of, and within the service mesh
8bUnderstand how to enable communication between multiple Consul datacenters
9Monitor Consul
9aDescribe Consul service mesh observability
9bReview Consul datacenter observability
10Operate and maintain Consul
10aManage Consul servers
10bMaintain Consul communications security
10cBackup and restore Consul cluster state
10dUnderstand Consul datacenter troubleshooting options

To renew any Consul Associate certification, you will need to take and pass the new Consul Associate 003 exam.

If you hold an unexpired Consul Associate 002 certification: You can take the new (003) exam starting 18 months after your previous exam date. When you pass the Consul Associate 003 exam to recertify, you will receive a new, separate set of credentials (badge and corresponding certificate) that will reflect your recertification date. The date of your credentials related to your Consul Associate 002 certification will not be updated.

If you hold an unexpired Consul Associate 003 certification: You can take the new exam starting 18 months after your previous exam date. When you pass the new exam, the expiration date on your credentials will be extended.

If you hold any expired Consul Associate certification: You are eligible to recertify at any time. When you pass the new exam, you will receive a new, separate set of credentials with a new expiration date.

Content Differences Between the 002 and 003 exams

We updated the Consul Associate 003 exam to account for how Condul has grown, and to accommodate future growth. The changes are primarily a reorganization and rewording of the 002 exam objectives. More significant changes are listed below.

(002) objectives NOT covered in (003)
4Access the Consul key/value (KV)
(002) objectives now covered within other objectives in (003)
1Explain Consul Architecture
2Deploy a single datacenter
7Secure agent communication
9Use gossip encryption
NEW objectives in (003)
1cSummarize how Consul controls access to services at point of entry
1dDiscuss how Consul automates networking tasks
2dUnderstand that Consul can run on multiple platforms
3cConfigure and start Consul on Kubernetes
8Secure and connect service mesh applications at scale
9Monitor Consul