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Hashicorp Certified: Vault Associate Certification Crash Course

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

In-depth and hands-on practice for acing the exam

In this course, you’ll:

  • Use Vault to manage secrets and sensitive data
  • Learn how to effectively navigate and solve questions during the Vault Associate exam

Course description

As organizations migrate to the cloud, secret management is of the utmost importance. HashiCorp Vault is a tool for storing, controlling, and accessing secrets and sensitive data in a centralized and secure fashion. The multiple-choice Vault Associate certification exam evaluates knowledge of Vault’s architecture, use of the command line and user interface to interact with the Vault server, and creating, configuring, and accessing secrets for real-world scenarios. Successful completion of the exam validates proficiency at the associate level.

Join expert Benjamin Muschko to walk through all the topics covered in the exam and hear about his personal experience with preparing for all of the exam’s ins and outs.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Vault’s use cases, architecture, and workflows
  • Utilizing Vault from the CLI, UI, and API

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a DevOps engineer who’s looking to use Vault.
  • You’re a cloud or cybersecurity engineer whose organization is adopting Vault.
  • You want to become a certified Vault Associate.

Prerequisites

  • A computer with Vault installed
  • An editor to write and modify configuration files (instructor will use VSCode, but other IDEs like IDEA may work as well)
  • A Git client (necessary to interact with a GitHub repository)
  • An AWS account and credentials for to perform tasks in some of the exercises (this is optional but recommended if you want to do the exercise)
  • Familiarity with Unix command-line tools like wget, curl, or tar
  • Knowledge of Bash scripting (e.g., syntax, language constructs)
  • Basic understanding of cloud technologies

Recommended preparation:

  • Explore course exercises and slides (GitHub repository link to come)

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Day 1

Exam basics (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Introduction to exam; exam tips and tricks
  • Q&A

Interacting with Vault (65 minutes)

  • Presentation: What is Vault?; Vault binary installation; starting the Vault server in development mode; interacting with Vault; exploring the Vault UI; common environment variables; using the Vault API
  • Hands-on exercises: Install Vault; call exemplary Vault API endpoints
  • Q&A
  • Break

Managing authentication methods (55 minutes)

  • Presentation: Available authentication methods; choosing an appropriate authentication method for a use case; configuring an authentication method; authentication method commands; authentication methods in the UI; enabling/disabling authentication methods
  • Hands-on exercise: Configure and use authentication methods
  • Q&A
  • Break

Managing policies (65 minutes)

  • Presentation: Policy overview; inspecting default policies; policy path syntax; capabilities overview; creating policies from the CLI and UI; assigning a policy to an authentication method; updating a policy; discussing policy examples
  • Hands-on exercise: Create an exemplary policy
  • Q&A
  • Break

Using tokens (65 minutes)

  • Presentation: Token overview; root token use cases and lifecycle; understanding accessors; creating tokens from the CLI; comparing service and batch tokens; understanding the time-to-live for tokens; understanding orphaned tokens
  • Hands-on exercises: Create a token; create batch, service, and orphaned tokens
  • Q&A

Day 2

Comparing and configuring secrets engines (80 minutes)

  • Presentation: Secrets engine overview; dynamic versus static secrets and use cases; understanding the transit engine; working with secrets from the CLI; working with secrets from the UI; accessing secrets engines; understanding response wrapping
  • Hands-on exercises: Enable and access secrets engines; use specific secret engines; use response wrapping
  • Q&A
  • Break

Managing leases (35 minutes)

  • Presentation: Leases overview; renewing and revoking leases
  • Hands-on exercise: Work with leases
  • Q&A

Understanding the Vault architecture (50 minutes)

  • Presentation: Architecture overview; storage backends; encrypting data; identity management; understanding the agent; sealing/unsealing; high availability concerns
  • Q&A
  • Break

Encryption as a service (40 minutes)

  • Presentation: Transit secret engine overview; working with transit secret engine; encrypting and decrypting secrets; rotating the encryption key
  • Hands-on exercise: Manage encryption from the CLI
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

Benjamin Muschko

Benjamin Muschko is a software engineer, consultant, and trainer with more than 20 years of experience in the industry. He specializes in cloud-native application development and transformation, container solutions, DevSecOps, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery implementations. Ben is an author, a frequent speaker at conferences, and an avid open source advocate.

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Skill covered

Security Certifications