Certified Vault Operations Professional – A Complete Guide

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. In this course, you will gain a deep understanding of HashiCorp Vault and how it helps manage secrets in an automated and secure way. You will learn about Vault’s various secrets engines, authentication methods, and security features. By the end, you’ll be proficient in setting up Vault in real-world scenarios, enabling you to securely manage credentials, encryption keys, and sensitive data for your organization. The course focuses on hands-on demos and practical implementations to ensure you're ready for real-world applications. You’ll start by familiarizing yourself with Vault’s core concepts, including the Key/Value Secrets Engine, Database Secrets Engine, and Transit Secrets Engine. Then, you'll dive deeper into the security hardening aspects of Vault, such as auto-unsealing, integrated storage, and Vault initialization. Through demos, you’ll configure these engines and methods to understand how they interact with one another. As you move through the course, you’ll configure different authentication methods like AppRole, Userpass, and Vault tokens, learning how each plays a role in ensuring access to secrets. The course also covers critical aspects like regenerating root tokens, securing Vault initialization, and rotating encryption keys, ensuring your Vault deployment remains secure and resilient. This course is ideal for security engineers, DevOps professionals, and anyone looking to strengthen their skills in secrets management and Vault security. No prior experience with HashiCorp Vault is required, but familiarity with IT infrastructure, cloud computing, or security concepts will be helpful. The course is structured for learners of all levels but leans toward an intermediate understanding of security and cloud technologies.

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. Master the art of securing and monitoring HashiCorp Vault while ensuring high availability for mission-critical environments. This course will equip you with the knowledge to effectively monitor Vault using telemetry, audit logs, and operational logs, ensuring you have full visibility into your system’s security and performance. You'll begin by learning how to track and interpret Vault’s telemetry, audit logs, and operational logs to detect anomalies and optimize performance. Through hands-on demos, you’ll gain practical experience in log analysis and monitoring strategies. Next, you’ll explore Vault’s security model, including best practices for secure client introductions and running Vault in Kubernetes environments. The course then dives into high availability (HA) and fault-tolerance, guiding you through configuring HA Vault clusters using various methods such as manual setups, Retry_Join, and Auto_Join. You’ll also learn how to enable and manage disaster recovery (DR) replication and promote secondary clusters when needed. Finally, you’ll explore Hardware Security Module (HSM) integration, understanding how auto-unsealing and seal wrapping enhance security and operational efficiency. This course is ideal for DevOps engineers, security professionals, and system administrators managing Vault deployments. A basic understanding of HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes, and infrastructure security is recommended.