HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional Practice Exam

The HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional certification is designed to validate the skills and knowledge required to operate HashiCorp Vault in an enterprise environment. Vault is a tool used for managing sensitive data, such as secrets, tokens, passwords, certificates, and encryption keys, in a secure and scalable manner. This certification certifies your skills to configure, manage, and troubleshoot Vault deployments. The certification includes managing policies, securing access, monitoring, and scaling Vault instances. The certification is suitable for professionals engaged in deploying and operating Vault.
Why is HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional important?

• Validates the ability to manage and operate Vault in an enterprise setting.
• Ensures proficiency in configuring and maintaining Vault for sensitive data management.
• Demonstrates knowledge of Vault’s security features, such as access control and encryption.
• Provides credibility for roles in DevSecOps, infrastructure management, and cloud security.
• Enhances the ability to scale Vault in a distributed system for high availability and performance.
• Supports career growth in roles involving cloud security, infrastructure automation, and compliance.
• Shows commitment to mastering industry-standard tools for secrets management and encryption.

Who should take the HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional Exam?

• Vault Administrator
• Cloud Security Engineer
• DevSecOps Engineer
• Infrastructure Engineer
• Systems Engineer
• Security Operations Engineer
• Cloud Architect
• Security Engineer
• Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
• IT Operations Manager

Skills Evaluated

Candidates taking the certification exam on the HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional is evaluated for the following skills:

• Installation and configuration of Vault in different environments (local, cloud, Kubernetes).
• Management of Vault’s storage backends and high availability setups.
• Creation and management of policies, roles, and authentication methods.
• Securing sensitive data, including secrets and encryption keys, using Vault.
• Monitoring and logging Vault’s performance and security events.
• Handling of Vault’s operational issues, such as failure recovery and troubleshooting.
• Scaling Vault deployments and integrating them with cloud environments.
• Best practices for securing and automating sensitive data management in production environments.

HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional Certification Course Outline
The HashiCorp Certified: Vault Operations Professional Certification covers the following topics -

Module 1. Create a working Vault server configuration given a scenario

• Enabling and configuring secret engines

• Production hardening practice
  

• Unseal Vault automatically
  

• Implementing integrated storage for open source and Enterprise Vault

• Enabling and configuring authentication methods

• Secure Vault initialization practice

• Regenerating a root token

• Rekey Vault and rotate encryption keys

Module 2. Monitor a Vault environment

• Monitoring and understanding Vault telemetry

• Monitoring and understanding Vault audit logs

• Monitoring and understanding Vault operational logs

Module 3. Employ the Vault security model

• Illustrate secure introduction of Vault clients

• Explain the security implications of running Vault in Kubernetes

Module 4. Build fault-tolerant Vault environments

• Configuring a highly available (HA) cluster

• Enable and configure disaster recovery (DR) replication in Vault Enterprise

• Promote a secondary cluster in Vault Enterprise

Module 5. Understand the hardware security module (HSM) integration

• Describe the benefits of auto unsealing with HSM in Vault Enterprise

• Explain seal wrap (PKCS#11) for the benefits and use cases in Vault Enterprise

Module 6. Scale Vault for performance

• Use batch tokens

• Describing the use cases of performance standby nodes in Vault Enterprise

• Enabling and configuring performance replication in Vault Enterprise

• Creating a paths filter in Vault Enterprise

Module 7. Configure access control

• Interpret Vault identity entities and groups

• Write, deploy, and troubleshoot ACL policies

• Understanding Sentinel policies in Vault Enterprise

• Defining control groups and describe their basic workflow in Vault Enterprise

• Describing and interpreting multi-tenancy with namespaces in Vault Enterprise

Module 8. Configure Vault Agent

• Securely configure auto-auth and token sink

• Configure templating