A Service-oriented Microservice Framework for University Course Registration System

University course registration systems are often built as monolithic applications that struggle under enormous enrollments simultaneously, resulting in high average response times or even temporary failures. To address this problem, we propose a service-oriented microservice framework that decomposes the core functions of the registration system, such as finding, enrolling, scheduling, and authenticating, into independently deployable services coordinated through an API gateway. Based on micro- service architecture, each service is containerized and orchestrated using a scalable and flexible platform (i.e., Docker Swarm). In this way, our system can be seamlessly and horizontally scaled with zero downtime and minimum maintenance. Additionally, to provide dynamic routing, authentication, rate limiting, and load balancing across replicas concerning the high traffic of requests, we choose the Kong API gateway as a complementary solution for our framework. The observations are collected and visualized through a metrics collection platform (i.e., Prometheus) and dashboards (i.e., Grafana). A medium-sized deployment is done to validate our framework’s configurations and functionalities. The results confirm that such a prototype has sufficient services and remains stable under high concurrency scenarios compared to a monolithic application.