Development of a modern platform based on AWS

• SECTOR: EDUCATION

• Task: This customer project was about replacing an external software for campus management with an in-house development.

• Team:

  • Total of about 50 people consisting of POs, Scrum Masters, BAs, UX designers, backend, frontend and full stack developers, DevOps

  • Multiple application teams for microservice architecture implementation

• Project duration: +12 months
   

• New development of a campus management software for a university

• Scaling: Steadily growing number of users. The existing software cannot scale with the increasing number of users

• Robustness: inconsistent performance under high load jeopardizes ongoing business processes

• Design & UX which no longer meets the requirements of the customer

• Preparation for internationalization: software is designed for the German/European market only

• Extensive reverse engineering of the legacy application

• Data integrity between the new and old system, given that the application is converted step by step instead of big bang

• Implementation of a microservice architecture with NodeJS
• Modular, simple and scalable front-end (micro front-end approach)
• Domain Driven Design
• Fully automated provisioning using AWS CloudFormation templates
• Communication of different services via Kafka
• Data integrity through a CDC mechanism using Apache Kafka

• Greater flexibility through modular software architecture
• Scalability through ECS (container services on AWS) and auto-scaling in the cloud
• Robustness through the use of Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation)
• Data integrity and synchronization through the use of modern services such as CDC mechanisms and Kafka.
• Faster release cycles through the use of CICD and Bitbucket pipelines
• Modern Secret Management through the use of Rotating Passwords and Infrastructure as Code

Development of a Campus Management Software

The customer’s objective was to replace an existing campus management software. The main users of the software are the in-house staff. Due to the success of the university and the constantly growing number of users, the software had to be adapted to meet the scaling requirements. Due to the abundance of data, another challenge was an outdated and confusing design. The existing software to be replaced was hosted on an on-premise system.

Cloud Infrastructure, Microservices, Domain-Driven Design and Infrastructure As Code

To address the various challenges, emphasis was placed on a modern technology stack with technologies such as AWS, ECS, Microservices, Infrastructure as Code and Bitbucket. Due to the loose coupling of services, the teams were able to independently develop and deploy their product.

The new development rests on a microservice architecture written with NodeJS and VueJS. The target infrastructure runs on a scaled ECS container solution on AWS. Emphasis was always placed on using a Domain Driven Design to ensure that software development processes adapt to the rapidly changing processes of the business. Thanks to the modern user experience design (UX), interaction with the product is simplified.

Another advantage of this is the isolation of the modules from other areas and layers of the software and the avoidance of duplicates in the software. The microservice architecture helps to release user requests faster and is considered the basis for scaling the software. Thanks to the newly introduced development and deployment workflows, consistent code quality is ensured and release cycles are accelerated.

The use of Infrastructure as Code using AWS CloudFormation made it possible to recover the entire infrastructure in a short time, making it more robust and greatly reducing the management overhead on the cloud infrastructure.

The use of Kafka was also very exciting. This was used as a communication layer between different services. Another benefit of Kafka was the use of a CDC (Change Data Capture) mechanism, which helped different systems to keep data synchronized and continuously updated in near-real time.

Project status and results

The further development of the project is ongoing. The benefits of the new technologies are already being felt by the customer as well as the users of the platform. Through the use of modern technologies and the cloud infrastructure AWS, the solution is very robust and now scales with the requirements of the users.

Cloud Infrastructure:

• AWS ECS with Autoscaling

Data Services:

• AWS MySQL for Aurora

• AWS ElasticCache Redis

• AWS Glue

CICD & IaC:

• AWS CodeDeploy

• Bitbucket Pipelines

• Sonarcloud

• AWS CloudFormation

Software Entwicklung:

• TypeScript – NestJS

• VueJS