Building a Global Testing System for International Educational Organizations with AWS Cloud: Stability and Speed
About project
The system offers features that allow education organizations to create tests and analyze the ability of students in three subjects: mathematics, English, and Japanese. In addition to creating tests, the system also issues certificates to students who passed the tests. With a global scale, the system can accommodate up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users and has the capability to expand to meet the increasing demands of users in the future."
Detailed information about the system's features is listed below:
・A website organizes exams and issues certificates to students.: The application provides an online platform for students to participate in exams and receive certifications upon successfully passing the exams.
・Grading: The automated grading system scores students' exam results based on predefined evaluation criteria.
・Statistics: The application provides a feature to analyze students' exam results.
・Result analysis: The system analyzes exam results to provide detailed information about students' performance and progress, helping teachers and administrators gain an overview of the learning process and make appropriate decisions.
Challenges:
Customers want to build a Global website system, and one of the challenges we face is ensuring fast and stable access for users worldwide. Geographic distance can cause delays in data transmission and reduce user experience.
The second challenge is that the system needs to handle millions of users participating in exams. With such a large number of concurrent accesses, request processing becomes a challenge. A system that is not powerful enough can lead to long latencies, interruptions, or even complete system failure, directly impacting customers' businesses
Solutions:
After consideration, we have decided to use AWS services to fully meet the customer's requirements, with the following details:
・Using the VPC service to create an isolated network environment and protect the system's resources from unauthorized access.
・The ECS service is used as a container runtime environment, including one API Cluster to handle API requests and one Worker Cluster to handle background tasks such as certificate generation, scoring, analysis, evaluation and statistics.
・The Auto Scaling service is used to automatically adjust the number of ECS tasks to meet continuously changing number of users.
・The Application load balancer service helps distributing incoming network traffic across the API Cluster. As Application load balancer operates at Layer 7 of the OSI model, it has flexible routing capabilities. It is used to route requests from Admin users, which have low load and do not require high speed.
・The Network load balancer service helps distributing incoming network traffic across the API Cluster. With its ability to handle high-speed requests and large traffic loads, Network Load Balancer is used to route requests for the purpose of performance such as testing.
・The Aurora service helps store SQL databases with high throughput processing capabilities to handle a large volume of queries. Additionally, Aurora supports auto scaling of the number of read replicas to meet continuously changing number of users.
・The S3 service is used to store Frontend static files with low cost and unlimited number of requests.
・The Cloudfront service, with its ability to cache Frontend static files, helps reduce latency when loading the website and improves the user experience.
・The WAF service helps inspect requests and prevent malicious requests to protect the system.
・The NAT Gateway service helps other services within the private subnets access the internet with high availability and high bandwidth capabilities.
Benefits:
Firstly, using AWS to build a Global Website helps save time, effort, and costs compared to deploying on-premise. There's no need to invest in hardware and infrastructure, only paying for the usage of AWS services. This reduces tasks related to monitoring, managing, and maintaining the system, allowing focus on developing system features while ensuring significantly reduced global system access time.
Secondly, using AWS also help quick establishment of system security measures. The system has used security services such as WAF to prevent malicious requests from accessing the system, VPC to place the system in a private network, protecting it from external attacks. Additionally, the system utilizes Security Groups to limit IP addresses allowed to access the system.
Lastly, using AWS minimizes downtime and ensures stable system operation. AWS's Multi-AZ model allows us to build a highly available and reliable system by deploying applications in multiple zones within the same geographical region. This ensures that if one zone encounters an issue, the system continues to operate normally. Furthermore, AWS provides the CloudWatch service, a tool for efficient system monitoring and management. By utilizing CloudWatch, we can detect and address technical issues immediately before they cause downtime or impact user experience.
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