Passing the Hashicorp Terraform Associate

May 31, 2024

The Hashicorp Terraform Associate exam will test your ability to recall the core concepts of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The test questions closely follow AWS resources making knowledge of AWS resources valuable.

Materials

These are the resources I used to learn and practice skills for the Hashicorp Terraform Associate exam.

Hashicorp Terraform training content

Hashicorp exam content

Udemy Course

Course created by Brian Krausen

Practice Tests

Practice Test from Brian Krausen

How I passed the AWS Associate Developer Exam DVA-C02

April 15th, 2024

I passed the AWS Associate Developer Exam DVA-C02 on the first try in March of 2024. I spent about 200hrs studying in preparation. My prior on the job experience was about 6 months of using Lambda, S3, CosmosDB, IAM, and API Gateway. I had already passed the Azure Developer Course the year prior and was familiar with similar Microsoft cloud product offerings and their uses.

Overall, this test is multiple choice and sometimes multiple answer. In my opinion the format makes it less difficult than the Microsoft Azure Developer exam. There is no code but there are CLI questions in the AWS exam. My 200hrs of study were condensed into about 6 weeks and I was able to go through the Udemy course below and work through all the labs before starting to take practice tests. After taking a few of the practice tests my weakest domain was in security topics and I focused reviewing that domain.

I would emphasize once again to create a study plan and to schedule what you will be studying on each day and plan an estimated real exam date.

After I was passing the practice tests consistenly at 90% I took the real exam.

Materials

These are the resources I used to learn and practice skills for the AWS exam.

AWS content

Read and understand the exam structure and content covered

Udemy Course

Course created by Stephane Maarek

Practice Tests

Jon Bonso's practice tests

Flash cards

Anki

I used Anki flashcards on my desktop and phone to be able to memorize and retain AWS content. I would suggest making flash cards of the recap questions at the end of each module in Stephane Maarek's Udemy course to get familiar with the main concepts and use Anki's spaced repetition system. Watchout for Anki impersonators, there are some scam clones of Anki out there. Anki Wikipedia

How I passed the AZ 204

April 14th, 2024

The AZ204 took me multiple tries to pass. It is a difficult test. Question struture is unique to the test and there are some sections you cannot go back and review. At the time I passed the test in 2023 there were multiple choice and multiple answer, fill in the blank, and a case-study like question. See the materials section for being prepared for what kind of questions are on the test. Having passed the Azure Developer Associate and the AWS Developer Associate exams I would call the Azure exam twice as difficult as compared to AWS.

It is important to know C# .NET since it is the primary language used on the test. It is important to practice the lab exercises in the microsoft content and use the CLI and the cloudshell to build and configure resources. There will be questions that involve code and the CLI commands.

My past experience with Azure before studying to take the exam was with Azure functions, API Management, Blob Storage and CosmosDB for about 6 months.

The most important part of studying was creating a study plan to study a consistent amount, and then take the real test after completing practice test at 90%.

Materials

These are the resources I used to learn and practice skills for the AZ204 exam.

Microsoft content

Read and understand the exam structure and content covered

Documentation of modules

The .NET on Azure series

Udemy Course

Course created by Scott Duffy

Practice Tests

Microsoft's Practice Test This format is different from the actual test.

MeasureUp practice tests. I used MeasureUp Practice tests from a work subscription. They were decent but compare other practice test content to find something with positive reviews.

Flash cards

Anki

I used Anki flashcards on my desktop and phone to be able to memorize and retain Azure content. I would suggest making flash cards of the recap questions at the end of each module and use Anki's spaced repetition system. Watchout for Anki impersonators, there are some scam clones of Anki out there. Anki Wikipedia