HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Authoring and Operations Advanced
Validate advanced production-grade Terraform authoring, complex refactoring with moved blocks, custom validation rules, custom provider development, disaster recovery state surgery, and zero-downtime blue/green infrastructure deployments.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
This advanced certification validates deep HCL authoring capabilities, complex module refactoring, custom provider development via the Go Plugin Framework, state surgery, and zero-downtime production deployment strategies.
The exam is a 120-minute advanced scenario and lab-style examination assessing deep code troubleshooting, state reconstruction, custom provider logic, and enterprise authoring.
Senior platform architects, provider developers, principal DevOps engineers, and technical leads responsible for authoring enterprise-wide shared modules and maintaining critical production infrastructure.
preconditions and postconditions are lifecycle assertions that validate expectations before creating a resource (precondition) or verify guarantees after creation (postcondition, such as verifying a certificate expiration date or private IP range).
Custom validation blocks on input variables evaluate expressions at plan time and output descriptive error messages, preventing misconfigurations before any cloud APIs are contacted.
moved blocks declare resource renames and relocations directly in code. When downstream users upgrade modules, Terraform updates their state files automatically without destroying and recreating resources.
The modern Go framework that enables developers to build native Terraform providers with type safety, schema definitions, structured diagnostics, and complete CRUD lifecycle hooks.
Restore from versioned remote backend snapshots, inspect JSON structure using jq, utilize terraform state push with serial tracking, and execute surgical terraform state rm and import operations.
Break the cycle by separating tightly coupled resources, extracting intermediate variables, using standalone attachment resources (e.g. aws_security_group_rule instead of inline rules), or introducing proxy resources.
The .terraform.lock.hcl file locks exact provider versions and checksums. Using terraform providers lock with -platform flags ensures team members on macOS and Linux runners share verified hashes.
Provision the green stack alongside blue, validate health via postconditions, swap DNS or load balancer target groups, and gracefully decommission the blue stack across sequential targeted runs.
A passing scaled threshold of 75% is required. Recommended preparation includes authoring custom Go providers, conducting state surgery labs, mastering Terraform 1.x advanced HCL, and extensive scenario practice.