BRAINS · Masterclass

Backing State and Storage

Make the work survive—and disappear when it should.

Classify agent state, choose storage shapes, set retention, and prove recovery instead of merely paying for backups.

You will build

A stateful agent with one durable artifact, one expiring cache, and one checkpointed task.

Your proof artifact

Storage lifecycle map, redacted restore log, measured recovery time, and a decision note.

Required Alternate Clouds deployment

Stateful Agent Recovery Lab

Class requirement: create or sign in to your Alternate Clouds account, deploy the Stateful Agent Recovery Lab template, and submit its live URL before the class is marked complete.

Create your Alternate Clouds account ↗

Use only work you own or are authorized to use.

Every submission needs a source-and-license manifest covering text, code, images, audio, video, fonts, datasets, models, weights, and AI reference inputs. Attribution alone is not permission. Questionable material stays private or is replaced before deployment or showcase.

Ask about rights clearance

01The agent junk drawer

Separate model assets, checkpoints, memory, logs, and user-owned work by lifecycle and consequence.

Applied exercise

Classify ten real artifacts as durable, reconstructable, disposable, regulated, or user-owned.

02Storage shapes

Compare ephemeral disk, persistent volumes, object storage, databases, caches, and vector stores.

Applied exercise

Choose a storage shape for each artifact and state the latency, portability, and cost trade-off.

03Privacy and retention

Treat minimization, deletion, tenant boundaries, and secrets as product decisions.

Applied exercise

Write a retention and deletion policy for the deployed agent.

04Recovery is a feature

Distinguish restart, redeploy, rollback, restore, and rebuild—and test the one you promise.

Applied exercise

Restart the app, restore a checkpoint, and verify that no side effect repeats.

The complete course adds the teaching deck, Alternate Clouds lab, source-bounded guide, review rubric, and instructor feedback.

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