Case of Whiteboard Company

Instructions:
Having read your report on the history of computing and a survey of software architecture, the Chief
Technology Officer of Whiteboard (the ‘Company’) decided to overhaul its technology strategy and
the management of its IT delivery teams to ensure they provide reliable student and learning
management systems to over 600 universities and institutions across the world. Whiteboard is a
leading student and learning management system provider, supporting over 10 million students
worldwide.
Flexibility and agility are critical to the Company so that they can incorporate new code and new
technologies that facilitate teaching and learning as frequently as they can and measure the effort of that. Continuous and frequent delivery lies at the core of the Company’s IT strategy and offers a great
competitive edge to the Company over its competitors.
The System they provide comprehensively manage the entire lifecycle of a student, from student
recruitment, student enrolment, tuition fee payment, learning content management, to student
academic record management, graduation and the issuance of qualification and certificate.
The Company is considering a restructure. “We are nowhere close to a continuous and frequent
delivery module, as it requires a shift to a more microservice-based approach to the monolithic
system”, said the Chief Technology Officer. “What we are looking to do is to break the System up
architecturally into microservices so that we can release code that does not have any dependencies
across the other components of the System.”
The Company is satisfied with the credentials you established in the previous report and have engaged
you to write a report to further advise them on the transition to microservice architecture. Your report
should address the following tasks:

Solution

Introduction

Whiteboard is a well-known company offering reliable student and learning management systems (LMS) to several universities and educational institutes supporting over 10 million students across the world. Whiteboard’s LMS aids the institutions in managing the chores throughout the lifecycle of students starting from their enrolment to tuition fee payments, academic record maintenance and issuance of certificates. As the company is utilizing the monolithic system of IT for enabling its LMS software, it has been facing several obstacles due to which the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) has decided to make a shift towards micro-service based model. In order to do so, this report has been structured so that CTO can be advised on how to achieve the objective of producing codes that operate in isolation instead of being dependent on the other components across the system. The report has the following sections:

Section 1: In this section, the micro-services architecture will be defined and will be compared to the monolithic system as followed by Whiteboard currently.

Section 2: In this section, the renowned companies that utilize micro-service architecture based IT will be outlined along with the advantages they reap, the challenges they face and the lessons they’ve learnt.

Section3: In this section, the relevant principles of service modeling and technologies will be outlined like Rest-API.

Section 4: This section will discuss the challenges that Whiteboard could face during transiting from monolithic system towards micro-service architecture.

Section 5: In the last section, several legal, ethical and security issues associated with micro-service architecture transitioning process will be discussed. In the end, conclusion and recommendations are made to follow a smooth transition towards micro-service architecture from monolithic model.