Take a chance on the Vault Associate career with the most useful study guide and practice test. Learn more about grabbing the HashiCorp Certified – Vault Associate certification through this article.
Who Should Take the HashiCorp Vault Associate Exam?
The Vault Associate certification is suitable for Cloud Engineers specializing in the development, security, or operations knowledge. They possess the basic concepts, skills, and use cases linked with open-source HashiCorp Vault.
Candidates can perform best in the Vault associate exam if they have professional experience using Vault in production, but if they learn the exam objectives in a unique demo environment, that may also be enough.
The candidate should understand what enterprise features exist and what can and cannot be done using the open-source offering.
What Skills Are Needed to Take the Vault Associate Exam?
The Vault Associate candidate must have-
- Basic terminal skills
- Basic knowledge of on-premise or cloud architecture
- Basic level of security understanding
Why There Is A Demand for Vault Associate Candidates?
Secret management plays a vital role in enterprise applications. Organizations are working with multi-cloud infrastructure and deployments. They need to maintain so many secrets and sensitive data to maintain for the applications to talk to databases or each other. Vault makes the whole method easier and cloud-agnostic, and therefore the need for a certified candidate is higher.
Obviously, the future is multi-cloud to design fault-tolerant and highly available systems, and it’s worth investing in this tool to manage secrets and protect sensitive data. If you are someone who is developing applications in a multi-cloud environment, you will definitely try it.
Is There Any Prerequisite to Take the Vault Associate Exam?
There is no official prerequisite to take the Vault Associate exam. Candidates will be best prepared for the exam if they have professional experience using Vault in production, but performing the exam objectives in a personal demo situation may also be enough. But, a candidate needs to be aware of at least one public cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, etc.
What Is the Exam Structure?
The Vault Associate exam is an online proctored exam with several types of questions such as multiple answers and multiple choice based. There are also true-false, and text-based questions like fill in the banks.
The Vault associate exam is 57 questions long and should be completed in 60 minutes. The exam is designed to validate the skill set of someone who has some professional experience. The exam costs you 70$, and there is no free retake for this exam. A candidate needs to complete the exam successfully in a single take. The aspirant gets the exam results instantly with the breakdown, and he will receive an email with the same effect as the Vault Certified Associate logo.
How to Start Preparing for the Vault Associate Exam?
It is highly recommended to have hands-on experience with any cloud provider. If the candidate lacks it, they must first go for it.
- The information provided in the Vault Associate official Study Guide and Exam Review Guide is enough to get ready for the certification exam.
- A candidate won’t benefit from the documentation if he does not have real-time experience with the Vault. They can install Vault on their local machine and start using it with the dev mode.
- Completion of the syllabus is a must, and covering different sections is a must. There are at least three questions on the Vault UI. Make sure you have some hands-on experience with the Vault UI and create secrets and tokens on the UI.
- Learn everything is path-based and try to define policies with the paths.
- Understand the difference between performance replication and Disaster Recovery replication.
- Remember the difference between Batch Tokens and Actual Tokens and their use cases.
- Make sure you know different kinds of secret engines and auth methods. You might be given a scenario and ask you which one you should use for that particular scenario.
- Understand the Token Hierarchy and TTL concepts.
- Practice more to earn confidence. Practicing states the condition of your preparation. Most of the questions are simple enough, and the number of scenario-based questions is less too. But, without actual practical hands-on experience and online practice exams experience, time management could be complex.
- This exam is very quick, and a candidate needs to complete 57 questions in 60 minutes. So, keep practicing to attempt maximum questions in the exam hall. Gain valuable insights into your preparation through the Vault Associate practice test and boost your confidence.
- On the actual exam day, the candidate gets the score immediately after he completes the exam. But, it takes a few days to receive the email for the badge. Once you receive the account, you can accept the digital badge from acclaim.
Concluding Thought:
There is no doubt about the value of getting a certification. Certifications boost your resume value, and as the Vault associate career is highly in demand, the certification leads towards a successful career.
