For study material I used udemy courses again. It was very well put together and gave me the confidence I needed. There are 2 resources in particular:
The course gave me the foundation, then the practice exams helped me to fill in gaps. I just referenced official documentation, or random Youtube videos to fill in those gaps.
I honestly found this exam the strangest. Maybe my preparation was inadequate or maybe the exam was updated recently and I didn’t pay attention. There were some features that I definitely didn’t see in my studying. Although, I was able to take what I did know about Consul and in general figure it out. I was fairly confident in most of my answers, but there were a few that I was just guessing on. My only advise for someone going down this path as well is to look at some of the Consul auditing features, how to enable what it logs etc. At least at the time of writing this, it wasn’t covered in anything I studied.
A lot of the exam was about configuring the Vault server, setting up policies, and memorizing CLI commands. In hindsight I will probably be doing more integrating with Vault than configuring it, but it’s good to know how to do it.
For those thinking about taking it, I recommend it. This exam wasn’t terribly difficult, and any certification is a good one in my opnion, but it wasn’t as useful for my day-to-day work as I thought it would be.
I really think Hashicorp should consider a different exam & certification for just integrating with Vault. There would still be some administration duties, but it would focus more on:
docker-compose and using Vault in a local development environment. I think this is a very common use case for Vault, and it would be good to have training for it. I’m sure there’s going to be some pitfalls for when I do need to do this.To speak a little more on the intrating with legacy applications. I think there are some common questions people have when first using vault they could answer in this general topic. For example, do you cache secrets? How would you cache secrets if your application is running in a cluster? Or should each application fetch its own credentials each time?
I’m happy I passed the exam, but in the end I came to the conclusion the exam wasn’t exactly FOR ME. I still do anticipate on getting my vault out of the education.
]]>So I started by doing a Udemy course on Vault. It was a good overview, which is a good start. Just want to see what all Vault is used for, what it can do etc. It was enough to get me started using it for projects, but I’m driven for some certifications still.
I took the material and basically broke it down into a couple of categories. It’s not all that the cert covers, but it’s a good start.
What I kinda noticed was with #3, you kinda need to know them to do the CLI commands. So I made 2 flashcard decks.
With this I’m finding myself passing the test exams pretty easily.
]]>One of the things that keeps me busy is teaching. It’s something I think everyone who works in Software Engineering should do if they have the opportunity. It works on skills that you just don’t get enough practice for on the job, but are so useful for your career advancement that it can’t be overstated. It also helps that I greatly enjoy the opportunity to help others learn. The ability to convey concepts, especially if you can teach something technical, is a skill that is in high demand and is a great way to give back to the community.
Another skill worth mentioning is just organizing. Moving up into technical leadership requires you to juggle more and more. I think a good chunk of that can be alleviated with just documenting. While this site isn’t that for me… I still want private notes for that. The correlation between them is strong enough. Just the desire to note down what I’ve learned and what I’m doing has helped me keep track of things and keep my head above water. Add to the organizing a class or two and you suddenly have a lot of things you’re writing down just to focus your thoughts.
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