RTO and RPO: planning disaster recovery that works
Set recovery time and recovery point objectives per system, choose between backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active, apply 3-2-1 backups and run drills.
Ideas & updates
Security, piracy and engineering deep dives, plus practical ideas for growing your institute. From the team building Upclass.
Set recovery time and recovery point objectives per system, choose between backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active, apply 3-2-1 backups and run drills.
Encryption transforms data; tokenization replaces it. How they compare with masking and hashing, how RBI card tokenisation works, and what to use for student and fee data.
Netflix downloads are encrypted, app-only, device-bound and time-limited. How they work, why offline copies are a target, and what to ask before offering downloads.
Deploy during a live class without anyone noticing: rolling, blue-green and canary compared, draining connections and WebSockets, feature flags and exam-day deploy freezes.
Keys, not ciphers, are where encryption usually fails. The key lifecycle, KMS, HSMs and vaults compared, keeping keys out of code, and what to ask a vendor.
Why rooted phones, jailbreaks and emulators matter to video apps, how detection gets bypassed, why attestation isn't enough, and what to ask your app vendor.
Change a live Postgres schema without locking students out: expand and contract, lock timeouts, concurrent indexes, NOT VALID constraints, batched backfills, safe Django migrations.
Data keys encrypt the data; a master key in a KMS wraps the data keys. How cloud KMS services work, why rotation is cheap, and the cost, quota and caching trade-offs.
All DRM uses encryption, but the two fail differently: captured keys, software-only devices, recording and shared logins. What each stops, and what to ask vendors.
Partition inside one server before you shard across many: Postgres declarative partitioning by date, shard keys for multi-institute platforms, the costs of sharding and when it pays.
Widevine L1 keeps keys in hardware; L3 keeps them in software and was publicly broken in 2019. Why that matters, why apps cap L3 quality, and what to ask.
Under DPDP, students under 18 are children. How to verify a parent under Rule 10, which tracking and ads are barred, the exemption for educational institutions, and a sign-up flow.
Upclass for institutes
Your courses, live classes and tests in your own branded app, with piracy protection on every lecture. Plans start at ₹1,999/month.