Responsive, resilient, elastic and message driven system solving scalability problems of course registrations

Abstract

Course registration is one of the most demanding functionalities of student management information systems. In the University Study-Oriented System (in short: USOS [7]) which is used in more than 40 Higher Education Institutions (in short: HEIs) in Poland (gathered in MUCI consortium [4]) we cope with it from the very beginning which dates back to 2000. There are various registration scenarios, some of them are more appealing to students and administration giving immediate feedback and being fully automatic, others are more practical and less demanding with respect to computing power. The optimal solution should stay user friendly but also get burden off the university administration, meaning both student’s offices and IT departments. We attacked the problem by a new approach inspired by the Reactive Manifesto ([5]) and built a reactive system, responsive, resilient, elastic and message driven. The registration is run in micro rounds until all the interested students register to courses which are offered by the university. Micro rounds last app. 5 minutes, so first come first served approach is avoided but anyway feedback is almost immediate. To achieve the respective responsiveness, scalability and resilience, involved technologies were chosen carefully. Backend server runs in asynchronous and distributed computation model of cooperating actors which exchange messages. Data is stored in NoSQL database kept in main memory for most of the time and the frontend is designed as a dynamic single page web application. The scalability of the new solution was tested using infrastructure of the University of Warsaw, the biggest HEI in Poland with more than 50 thousand students.