HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (003) Cert Prep

Course details

Consul is HashiCorp's service mesh and networking tool for connecting, securing, and configuring services across distributed infrastructure. This course prepares you for the HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate (003) certification exam, covering the foundational know-how and skills you need to tackle the exam like a pro, including how to identify Consul Enterprise features and distinguish them from Community Edition. Whether you're a cloud engineer, site reliability engineer, solutions architect, or DevOps professional specializing in security, development, networking, or operations, this course covers the core concepts, skills, and use cases required for the certification.

Learning objectives
Apply the pillars of service networking.
Describe Consul architecture.
Deploy a single datacenter.
Register services and use service discovery.
Use Consul service mesh.
Secure agent communication.
Secure services with basic access control lists (ACLs).
Secure and connect service mesh applications.
Monitor Consul.

Concepts

Course Introduction

Course introduction

Explain Consul Architecture

Objective 1 - Section overview
Introduction to HashiCorp Consul
Service discovery
Service mesh
Network automation
Service configuration
Basic Consul architecture
Consensus protocol (Raft)
Gossip protocol (Serf)
Network traffic and ports
Consul high availability
Scaling for performance
Voting versus non-voting servers
Redundancy zones
Consul autopilot
Objective 1 - Section recap

Deploy a Single Data Center

Objective 2 - Section overview
Start the Consul process
Lab session - Starting the Consul process in dev mode
Manage the Consul process
Consul agent configuration
Lab session - Creating a Consul agent configuration
Configure networking and ports
Adding and removing Consul agents to the cluster
Lab session - Adding and removing Consul agents
Objective 2 - Section recap

Register Services and Use Service Discovery

Objective 3 - Section overview
Registering a Consul service
Creating a service definition
Lab session - Service definition and registration
Configuring service health checks
Lab session - Working with health checks
Check service status from the catalog
Lab session - Check service status from the catalog
Introduction to prepared queries
Lab session - Prepared queries
Objective 3 - Section recap

Access the Consul Key Value (KV)

Objective 4 - Section overview
Introduction to Consul K V Store
Interacting with Consul K V
Lab session - Working with the Consul K V
Using Consul watch to monitor changes
Using envconsul
Lab session - Using envconsul to monitor changes to Consul K V
Using consul-template
Lab session - Using consul-template to monitor changes to Consul K V
Objective 4 - Section recap

Back Up and Restore

Objective 5 - Section overview
Introduction to Consul snapshots
Using Consul snapshots
Lab session - Consul snapshots
Consul snapshot agent (Enterprise)
Lab session - Using the Consul snapshot agent (Enterprise)
Objective 5 - Section recap

Register a Service Proxy

Objective 6 - Section overview
Introduction to Consul service mesh
Registering a service proxy
Introduction to Consul service mesh intentions
Managing Consul service mesh intentions
Lab session - Service mesh
Objective 6 - Section recap

Secure Agent Communication

Objective 7 - Section overview
Consul security threat model
Certificates required in Consul
TLS encryption settings
Objective 7 - Section recap

Secure Services with Basic ACLs

Objective 8 - Section overview
Introduction to the Consul ACL system
Lab session - Enable and configure the Consul ACL system
Creating ACL policies
Lab session - Creating ACL policies
Creating and managing ACL tokens
Lab session - Creating ACL tokens
Perform a UI task using a token
Lab session - Using tokens with the Consul UI
Perform a CLI request using a token
Lab session - Using tokens with the Consul CLI
Perform an API request using a token
Lab session - Using tokens with the Consul API
Objective 8 - Section recap

Use Gossip Encryption

Objective 9 - Section overview
Introduction to gossip encryption
Objective 9 - Section recap
Configure gossip encryption
Lab session - Configure gossip encryption
Manage the lifecycle of encryption keys
Lab session - Managing the lifecycle of encryption keys