Networking
Automation Certification
Pass the Consul Associate certification exam to validate your networking automation skills.
Consul Associate (003)
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.
Consul Associate (003) Details
- 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 Type | Multiple choice |
| Format | Online proctored |
| Duration | 1 hour |
| Price | $70.50 USD, plus locally applicable taxes and fees. Free retake not included. |
| Language | English |
| Expiration | 2 years |
| 1 | Understand the pillars of service networking |
|---|---|
| 1a | Understand how Consul discovers, tracks, and monitors the health of services |
| 1b | Explain how Consul secures service to service communication |
| 1c | Summarize how Consul controls access to services at point of entry |
| 1d | Discuss how Consul automates networking tasks |
| 2 | Describe Consul architecture |
|---|---|
| 2a | Identify Consul datacenter components including agents and communication protocols |
| 2b | Review Consul server high availability & scalability options |
| 2c | Differentiate between server agents and data plane components (client agents and Consul Dataplane) |
| 2d | Understand that Consul can run on multiple platforms |
| 3 | Deploy a single datacenter |
|---|---|
| 3a | Configure, bootstrap, and start Consul server agents |
| 3b | Configure and start Consul client agents |
| 3c | Configure and start Consul on Kubernetes |
| 3d | Explain Consul agent join methods and behavior |
| 4 | Register services and use service discovery |
|---|---|
| 4a | Interpret a service registration |
| 4b | Differentiate between service registration methods |
| 4c | Understand service health check configuration options and behaviors |
| 4d | Query Consul's service catalog via CLI, API, UI, and/or DNS, and interpret the results |
| 4e | Interpret & use prepared queries |
| 5 | Use Consul service mesh |
|---|---|
| 5a | Consider high level architecture & key benefits of Consul service mesh |
| 5b | Understand Consul service mesh intentions & when to use them |
| 5c | Apply proxy configuration options within Consul service mesh |
| 6 | Secure agent communication |
|---|---|
| 6a | Understand Consul security/threat model |
| 6b | Differentiate certificate types needed for TLS encryption |
| 6c | Interpret TLS encryption settings & intended use |
| 6d | Configure gossip encryption |
| 7 | Secure services with basic access control lists (ACLs) |
|---|---|
| 7a | Understand Consul ACL system components and usage |
| 7b | Create and configure ACL policies and tokens |
| 7c | Use ACL tokens to communicate securely with Consul services and agents |
| 8 | Secure and connect service mesh applications |
|---|---|
| 8a | Use Consul gateways to securely connect and access services into, out of, and within the service mesh |
| 8b | Understand how to enable communication between multiple Consul datacenters |
| 9 | Monitor Consul |
|---|---|
| 9a | Describe Consul service mesh observability |
| 9b | Review Consul datacenter observability |
| 10 | Operate and maintain Consul |
|---|---|
| 10a | Manage Consul servers |
| 10b | Maintain Consul communications security |
| 10c | Backup and restore Consul cluster state |
| 10d | Understand Consul datacenter troubleshooting options |
Visit the exam appointment rules and requirements page.
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) | |
|---|---|
| 4 | Access the Consul key/value (KV) |
| (002) objectives now covered within other objectives in (003) | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Explain Consul Architecture |
| 2 | Deploy a single datacenter |
| 7 | Secure agent communication |
| 9 | Use gossip encryption |
| NEW objectives in (003) | |
|---|---|
| 1c | Summarize how Consul controls access to services at point of entry |
| 1d | Discuss how Consul automates networking tasks |
| 2d | Understand that Consul can run on multiple platforms |
| 3c | Configure and start Consul on Kubernetes |
| 8 | Secure and connect service mesh applications at scale |
| 9 | Monitor Consul |
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