Tech Exam Prep

Tech Exam Prep

By Ran Chen, EA, CFP®EducationHow ToCourses
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Tech Exam Prep episodes

  • [AWS CCP] 36, Amazon Route 53 DNS
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - How Route 53 serves as both a domain registrar and a highly available DNS service.
    - The difference between simple routing for single resources and weighted routing for traffic splitting scenarios like A/B testing.
    - When to choose latency-based routing for global performance versus geolocation routing for content localization and compliance.
    - The function of health checks in enabling automatic failover routing to a standby resource for disaster recovery.
    - A mnemonic to recall the five main routing policies: Simple, Weighted, Latency, Failover, and Geolocation.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 35, Elastic Load Balancing
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - Application Load Balancers (ALB) operate at Layer 7 and are ideal for routing HTTP/HTTPS traffic based on content like URL paths.
    - Network Load Balancers (NLB) operate at Layer 4, providing high performance and low latency for TCP/UDP traffic, along with a static IP address.
    - Gateway Load Balancers (GWLB) operate at Layer 3 and are used to deploy and scale third-party virtual network appliances like firewalls.
    - Health checks automatically detect unhealthy instances and reroute traffic to healthy ones to maintain application availability.
    - The key differences in cross-zone load balancing: it is enabled by default for ALBs but disabled by default for NLBs.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 34, Amazon CloudFront CDN
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - That Amazon CloudFront is a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) designed to reduce latency by caching content at edge locations closer to users.
    - CloudFront can use various origin types, including S3 buckets for static content and custom origins like Application Load Balancers or EC2 instances for dynamic content.
    - How to enforce end-to-end encryption by requiring HTTPS for both viewer-to-CloudFront and CloudFront-to-origin connections.
    - That CloudFront integrates with AWS Shield Standard for free, offering automatic protection against common DDoS attacks.
    - The critical difference between CloudFront for performance-based content caching and S3 Cross-Region Replication for disaster recovery and data redundancy.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 33, AWS Lambda and Serverless
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events without you managing servers.
    - The pricing model is pay-per-use, based on the number of invocations and the execution duration in milliseconds.
    - Common exam-tested triggers for Lambda include API Gateway for HTTP requests, S3 for object uploads, and DynamoDB for data changes.
    - A critical limitation to remember for exam scenarios is the 15-minute maximum execution timeout.
    - The term "serverless" means AWS manages the underlying servers, patching, and scaling, not that servers are absent.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 32, Amazon VPC Networking
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - A VPC is your private, isolated network in AWS, and subnets are used to partition it across Availability Zones for high availability.
    - A subnet becomes public by having a route in its route table that points to an Internet Gateway (IGW), enabling two-way internet communication.
    - Private subnets achieve secure, outbound-only internet access for tasks like software updates by using a NAT Gateway that resides in a public subnet.
    - VPC Peering creates a direct, one-to-one, non-transitive connection between two VPCs, meaning you cannot chain connections through a central VPC.
    - AWS Transit Gateway acts as a scalable, central hub to connect many VPCs and on-premises networks, overcoming the limitations of VPC Peering.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    3 min
  • [AWS CCP] 31, Amazon DynamoDB
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - DynamoDB is a serverless NoSQL database, ideal for key-value and document data models where a flexible schema is needed.
    - On-Demand capacity is best for new or unpredictable workloads, charging per request, while Provisioned capacity is for predictable traffic and offers lower costs.
    - Global Tables provide a multi-region, active-active database for low-latency access for a geographically distributed user base.
    - DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) is an in-memory cache that dramatically speeds up read performance for read-heavy applications.
    - A common exam trap is choosing DynamoDB for scenarios requiring complex SQL joins, which is a feature of relational databases like RDS.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    2 min
  • [AWS CCP] 30, Amazon RDS and Database Services
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - The core function of Amazon RDS as a managed service for six popular relational database engines.
    - How Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability and automatic failover through synchronous replication.
    - The specific role of Read Replicas in scaling database read performance using asynchronous replication.
    - The critical difference between Multi-AZ (for disaster recovery) and Read Replicas (for performance), which is a common exam trap.
    - A simple mnemonic to distinguish between the use cases for Multi-AZ and Read Replicas.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 29, Amazon S3 Storage Classes
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - To differentiate S3 Standard for frequent access versus Infrequent Access (IA) classes for cost savings on data that is not accessed often.
    - The key trade-off between S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA, which is multi-AZ resilience versus lower storage costs.
    - How S3 Intelligent-Tiering automates cost optimization for data with unknown or unpredictable access patterns.
    - To identify the correct S3 Glacier tier (Instant, Flexible, or Deep Archive) based on the required data retrieval time.
    - The function of S3 Lifecycle policies in automatically transitioning objects between storage classes to manage costs over time.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 28, Amazon EC2 Instance Types
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - How to match the five main EC2 instance families (General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, Storage Optimized, Accelerated Computing) to specific exam-based workload scenarios.
    - The ideal use case for On-Demand pricing: short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads where flexibility is paramount.
    - When to choose Reserved Instances for significant cost savings on applications with steady-state, predictable usage over a one or three-year term.
    - The critical distinction of Spot Instances for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads that can leverage discounts up to 90%.
    - Why Savings Plans offer more flexibility than Reserved Instances by committing to a usage amount rather than a specific instance type.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • [AWS CCP] 27, AWS Firewall and Access Control
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - AWS WAF protects web applications at Layer 7 from exploits like SQL injection, and is associated with CloudFront and Application Load Balancers.
    - AWS Network Firewall is a managed, stateful firewall for VPCs that provides centralized, network-level traffic filtering and inspection.
    - Security Groups are stateful firewalls for instances, meaning return traffic is automatically allowed, while Network ACLs are stateless firewalls for subnets, requiring explicit outbound rules for responses.
    - VPC Endpoints (Gateway and Interface) enable private and secure connectivity from a VPC to AWS services without traversing the public internet.
    - AWS PrivateLink is the underlying technology for Interface Endpoints that allows private connections to AWS services, third-party services, and services in other VPCs.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min

About Tech Exam Prep

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Tech Exam Prep is a free, daily podcast by OpenExamPrep covering the most in-demand IT and technology certification exams — including CompTIA Security+, AWS Cloud Practitioner, CompTIA Network+, CCNA,…