Creación de una arquitectura de alta disponibilidad utilizando contenedores y microservicios para procesos concurrentes en una institución de educación superior

Abstract

As a result of the growing demand for computing resources that involves the creation of cloud services for institutions and companies, interesting architectural proposals have arisen from the need for computing solutions with high levels of stability, performance and availability for a massive number of users. Higher Education Institutions face processes that are demanded by large volumes of users, such as faculty, administrative staff and students. With special focus on the latter, it is necessary to meet the needs of stability, performance and availability, for the proper functioning of computer services. Therefore, this project aims to create a high availability architecture, using containers and microservices, to evaluate the performance of a highly concurrent prototype of the enrollment web system of the Continuing Education Center of the Technical University of Machala, against a large number of simultaneous requests, applying the SEED(S) methodology for the design of highly cohesive services and low coupling, to minimize the obvious drawbacks that the current system has for the user, when the enrollment periods are opened. Two software architectures were obtained as the resulting products: the first, a microservices architecture capable of meeting the requirements foreseen to support up to 8000 concurrent users, and the second, a monolithic architecture covering the same business domain, which was used to contrast performance against high levels of simulated concurrency, thus demonstrating the superiority of the proposed architecture, in terms of performance, number of requests handled, percentage error and average response time, highlighting as a primary recommendation the use of both hardware and operating systems suitable for performing such demanding tests and obtaining consistent and accurate results.