Enhancing user experience and productivity in education with microservices-based solutions

WBS TRAINING had a learning management system that allowed them to handle different types of media products that they provided for students to study specific courses. The system consisted of several monolithic parts that required multiple authentications and needed to be constantly synchronized. The synchronization process was quite burdensome and could take up to several hours to complete. This caused low system performance and long loading times (5+ minutes), which, in turn, hindered employee productivity.

Additionally, WBS TRAINING had similar issues with their desktop application for student management, which they used to create learning course offers for students.

To boost their operational efficiency and ensure a smooth experience for students, WBS TRAINING decided to redesign their legacy learning management system into a unified platform and modernize the student management application.

Our team has designed the microservices architecture using the domain-driven approach and built the new learning management system. We have built over 10 microservices based on the client’s complex business logic, namely, users, students, offers for courses, units, etc.

Moreover, N-iX has implemented authentication in the system using OpenID — an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. It allows clients to verify the user's identity based on the authentication performed by an authorization server and obtain necessary profile information about the end-user in an interoperable and REST-like manner.

Also, we have built custom authorization that gives permissions for roles and different users. Our experts have implemented a simple mail transfer protocol service that is integrated with the client’s mailing system.

Additionally, our team has used the Event Bus for synchronous communication between microservices and business transactions, which reduced the page response time from over 5 min to less than a second (0.4-0.5 sec). Our team has built an engine based on Event Bus to migrate data from the old system. The amount of data we have migrated ranges from 120 thousand to 1.5 million entities.

Besides development and architecture design, our team has also performed unit, integration, and system testing to ensure the solution’s high quality.

Our client had a legacy desktop student management application built with C# which had inefficient performance and very long loading times (7-10 minutes, on average). Our team has designed the architecture and developed a new web application with single sign-on technology. It allows adding new students and information about them, such as education or important dates. This data is then used for creating offers with different courses for students. Our engineers have used the Elasticsearch engine, React.js, PHP 8, and Symphony during development. As a result, we were able to reduce the application’s load time to ~1 s and increase its overall performance by 30%.

By designing the architecture and developing two new solutions from scratch, N-iX has helped WBS TRAINING gain several substantial benefits:

• Streamlined operations by rewriting the legacy solution and successfully building a unified system with improved performance;
• Expanded system flexibility by designing and implementing the microservices architecture that allows integration of important components;
• Increased employee productivity, improved security capabilities, reduced password fatigue, and streamlined user experience by implementing single sign-on technologies;
• Enhanced customer experience by building communication between services in the new learning management system, which reduced the page response time from over 5 min to 0.4-0.5 sec;
• Improved service quality by allowing to create better course offers based on student data collected by the newly developed student management system.