Free HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate Practice Test

What is the primary role of a Consul server agent in a Consul datacenter?

A development team wants to discover service instances dynamically without hardcoding IP addresses. They need the simplest integration method. Which Consul service discovery method should they use?

What is the primary purpose of Consul Connect in a service mesh architecture?

Which Consul feature allows you to define which services are allowed to communicate with each other in a service mesh?

An operator needs to add a new Consul server to an existing cluster. What is the recommended minimum number of server agents for a production Consul datacenter?

A company has deployed Consul across three availability zones in AWS. They want to ensure that services prefer instances in the same availability zone for performance. Which Consul feature should they configure?

Your organization runs Consul in multiple datacenters. Services in Datacenter A need to discover and communicate with services in Datacenter B. What Consul feature enables this capability?

A microservice is failing health checks intermittently due to slow startup times. The service takes approximately 60 seconds to become ready. How should you configure the health check to prevent premature failure notifications?

Your team wants to implement canary deployments where 10% of traffic goes to a new version of a service and 90% to the existing version. Which Consul service mesh feature enables this?

An application using Consul Connect is experiencing connection failures. You discover that an intention exists with Action: deny for the source-destination pair. What is the correct way to allow communication?

Your organization requires that all API access to Consul must be authenticated and authorized. Which security feature must be enabled first to implement this requirement?

During a Consul server failure in a cluster of 5 servers, you notice the cluster continues to operate normally. What is the maximum number of servers that can fail before the cluster loses quorum and stops accepting writes?

A service registered with Consul needs to be discoverable by different names depending on the environment (e.g., 'payment-service' and 'billing-api' should resolve to the same instances). What is the best approach to implement this?

Your service mesh implementation requires that all traffic to the database service must pass through a specific egress gateway before leaving the Kubernetes cluster. Which Consul configuration objects would you use?

You need to perform a rolling update of Consul server agents without service disruption. What is the recommended approach?

An application team reports that service discovery via DNS is returning all registered instances, including unhealthy ones. The Consul health checks are properly reporting unhealthy status. What configuration should you verify?

Your company has a compliance requirement that all service-to-service traffic must be encrypted in transit and you need to prove which services communicated with each other. Which Consul features together satisfy this requirement?

A Consul datacenter spanning multiple cloud regions is experiencing slow service discovery queries. Network latency between regions is 100ms+. The architecture uses server agents distributed across all regions. What architectural change would best improve performance?

You need to implement a service mesh architecture where legacy applications that cannot be modified must communicate with mesh-enabled services. These legacy apps cannot run sidecar proxies. What Consul feature should you use?

After enabling ACLs in your Consul cluster, automated service registrations from your deployment pipeline are failing with permission denied errors. The pipeline uses a token with service:write permission for a specific service name, but services are being registered with dynamic port numbers. What is the most likely cause?