HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (003)
Validates foundational knowledge of HashiCorp Consul for service networking, service mesh, and service discovery. Covers the pillars of service networking, Consul architecture including server and client agents, single datacenter deployment, service registration and discovery via DNS and API, service mesh with intentions and proxies, securing agent communication with TLS and gossip encryption, ACL-based access control, gateways for cross-datacenter connectivity, observability, and operational maintenance including backup and troubleshooting. Designed for cloud engineers specializing in security, networking, development, or operations. Requires familiarity with Consul Enterprise features.
Exam domains
- Monitor Consul11%
Observe service mesh traffic by configuring Envoy metrics, access logs, and OpenTelemetry/Prometheus integrations, and surface mesh health in the topology view. Monitor Consul server and client telemetry (raft, autopilot, gossip metrics), enable audit logging on Enterprise, and stream operator events to centralized logging for compliance.
- Use Consul Service Mesh11%
Explain the Consul service mesh data plane built on Envoy sidecars and the agentless Consul Dataplane, including how proxies enforce mTLS for east-west traffic. Configure L4 and L7 intentions to allow or deny service-to-service traffic, and use service-defaults, service-resolver, service-router, and service-splitter config entries to implement traffic-shaping behaviors like canary and failover.
- Secure Agent Communication11%
Apply the Consul security/threat model by enabling TLS for RPC and HTTPS API traffic, distinguishing CA certificates, server certificates, and the built-in Connect CA from external CAs (Vault, ACM). Configure TLS settings (`verify_incoming`, `verify_outgoing`, `verify_server_hostname`, `auto_encrypt`) and enable gossip encryption with a shared 32-byte key plus encryption-key rotation.
- Operate and Maintain Consul11%
Sources
Questions are grounded in 50 references from official and authoritative materials.