Updated in May 2025.

This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. The HashiCorp Certified Vault Associate course is designed to equip learners with the knowledge and skills required to manage secrets and sensitive data securely using HashiCorp Vault. By the end of this course, you'll be prepared to tackle the Vault Associate certification exam. This course covers fundamental concepts such as Vault’s architecture, installation, and configuration, ensuring you're well-versed in managing encryption and secrets in real-world environments. You'll begin by exploring the basics of Vault, its architecture, and its various components. The course dives deep into Vault’s architecture, explaining its seal and unseal processes, initialization, and configuration files. Through a series of labs, you’ll learn how to set up and configure Vault in both development and production environments. These hands-on labs will ensure you understand every critical aspect of Vault’s setup, including integrating with cloud environments and managing storage backends. As you progress, you'll focus on security features such as authentication methods, policies, and token management. You'll gain in-depth knowledge on how Vault’s policies work, including how to manage them using the CLI, UI, and API. The course also includes practical exercises on token management, including lifecycle control, periodic tokens, and orphan tokens, all of which are essential skills for a Vault administrator. This course is perfect for anyone aiming to become proficient in Vault’s security practices. It’s ideal for IT professionals, DevOps engineers, and security specialists who wish to deepen their expertise in managing secrets securely. Prior experience with cloud computing and general security concepts is recommended, but not mandatory. This course is suitable for learners at an intermediate level of IT security.