HashiCorp Updated VA-002-P Exam Questions and Answers by ayzal

Each time a new provider is added to configuration -- either explicitly via a provider block or by adding a resource from that provider -- Terraform must initialize the provider before it can be used. Initialization downloads and installs the provider's plugin so that it can later be executed.

You do not need to specify every required argument in the backend configuration. Omitting certain arguments may be desirable to avoid storing secrets, such as access keys, within the main configuration. When some or all of the arguments are omitted, we call this a partial configuration.

With a partial configuration, the remaining configuration arguments must be provided as part of the initialization process. There are several ways to supply the remaining arguments:

Interactively: Terraform will interactively ask you for the required values unless interactive input is disabled. Terraform will not prompt for optional values.

File: A configuration file may be specified via the init command line. To specify a file, use the -backend-config=PATH option when running terraform init. If the file contains secrets it may be kept in a secure data store, such as Vault, in which case it must be downloaded to the local disk before running Terraform.

Command-line key/value pairs: Key/value pairs can be specified via the init command line. Note that many shells retain command-line flags in a history file, so this isn't recommended for secrets. To specify a single key/value pair, use the -backend-config="KEY=VALUE" option when running terraform init.

When a parent token is revoked, all of its child tokens and leases are revoked as well. This ensures that a user cannot skip revocation by simply making a timeless tree of child tokens.

Within each datacenter, we have a mixture of clients and servers. It is expected that there be between three to five servers. This strikes a balance between availability in the case of failure and performance, as consensus gets progressively slower as more machines are added. However, there is no limit to the number of clients, and they can easily scale into the thousands or tens of thousands.

Server or Leader - It indicates whether the agent is running in server or client mode. Server nodes participate in the consensus quorum, storing cluster state, and handling queries. At any given time, the peer set elects a single node to be the leader. The leader is responsible for ingesting new log entries, replicating to followers, and managing when an entry is considered committed.

Client or Follower - Client nodes make up the majority of the cluster, and they are very lightweight as they interface with the server nodes for most operations and maintain a very little state of their own.

Reference link:- https://www.consul.io/docs/internals/architecture.html