Free TA-004 sample questions

Correct answer: Terraform uses a provider-agnostic workflow where the core CLI handles lifecycle management, while specific Plugins (Providers) handle the API translation.

Terraform Core is cloud-agnostic and handles the workflow (Plan, Apply, State). It relies on specific Providers (plugins) to translate these lifecycle events into the specific API calls required by the target platform (AWS, Azure, etc.).

Correct answer: False

False. Terraform is declarative. The order of provisioning is determined by the dependency graph derived from implicit and explicit dependencies, not the order of the text blocks in the file.

Correct answer: It is possible by defining multiple provider blocks in the configuration and instantiating resources using those specific providers.

Terraform supports multi-cloud orchestration within a single configuration by simply defining multiple `provider` blocks (e.g., one for `aws` and one for `azurerm`). Resources are then associated with the respective providers.

Correct answer: Run `terraform init` to download the new provider plugin and update the dependency lock file.

Whenever a new provider is added or a version constraint is changed, `terraform init` must be run to download the plugin binary to the `.terraform` directory and update the `.terraform.lock.hcl` file.

Correct answer: .terraform.lock.hcl

The dependency lock file (`.terraform.lock.hcl`) records the exact versions and checksums of all providers used. Committing this file ensures that `terraform init` installs the exact same versions across all environments.

Correct answers: Using a remote backend with encryption at rest is recommended to protect the state file content.; Sensitive values are stored in plain text in the state file, even if marked as sensitive in the configuration.

Since the state file contains plain text secrets, the recommended best practice is to store it in a secure remote backend (like S3 with encryption or HCP Terraform) and restrict access permissions.

The `sensitive` flag only redacts the value from CLI output. The value is still stored in plain text in the `terraform.tfstate` file to perform diffs.