Context At Clever, we rely on nearly two thousand infrastructure secrets like DB access keys, API tokens, and session secret keys to provide our services to students and teachers.  Properly securing these secrets so we don’t expose them in our various environments requires thorough engineering efforts. In fact, securing secrets is generally a hard problem […]

Listen to an interview with our CTO and architect discuss how we chose a new computer language.

When building systems for new products, there’s a delicate balance between writing code that works and writing code that lasts. A common anti-pattern is preemptively optimizing systems for the future while still trying to find product market fit. For new product teams, this can be a costly mistake as it leads to a slower iterative […]

Five women on Clever’s engineering team discuss what inclusivity looks like at Clever, how to grow and maintain female leadership at a tech company, and the challenges they are excited to tackle within their roles. The engineering team is passionate about improving education and solving hard problems. One problem the Clever team is constantly solving […]

At Clever, we lock down code access to customer data using AWS IAM roles with session policies. In Clever’s microservice AWS architecture, each service has a unique IAM role with access to the AWS resources it needs: S3 buckets, DynamoDB tables, and so on. Our services are multi-tenant and customer data is separated via logical […]

Everyone in the US is now back in school, and we’ve been feeling the rush of excitement here at Clever over the last few weeks. On a typical day at Clever this school year, we regularly hit more than 1,000 logins per second! As we’ve chronicled over the last few months (July, May) , the […]

Over the last few months, we’ve been readying Clever SSO for our biggest year ever. We want students across the country logging in quickly and reliably to all of their learning applications. A couple of months ago, we described our initial stress testing approach. In this post, we want to tell you more about this […]

Clever Goals is a new product that tracks students’ educational software usage. It creates progress data, a new type of data for Clever. This sensitive data needs to be protected from unauthorized access, and users should feel in control over how it’s used. How does the Clever security team make sure that new products like […]

Two months ago, we experienced the worst outage in the history of Clever SSO. We wrote up a postmortem soon afterwards. We mentioned at the time that this postmortem was the beginning of our process to reevaluate everything we do to make sure we can be worthy of the trust you place in us. We […]

For data engineers and analysts, it’s pretty common to get questions about missing or incorrect data. “Hey Data Engineer, there’s an issue with the data – I expect numbers at least 20% higher than what our reporting tools show. Can you take a look?” If you’ve ever been responsible for a Business Intelligence pipeline, you’ve […]