Microservices · Academic platform / 2025
Smart University
A distributed academic management platform with role-specific experiences and event-driven services.
The product
Engineering clarity
into complexity.
Smart University modernizes academic operations through independently deployable services for users, academics, grades, complaints and class management, protected by centralized identity and gateway policies.
- Domain-oriented independent microservices
- OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and JWT with Keycloak
- REST/OpenFeign sync and RabbitMQ async communication
- Role-specific admin, teacher and student experiences
01 / The challenge
The problem behind
the interface.
University workflows span users, courses, grades, classes and complaints, but a monolith makes independent evolution difficult. The project explored domain separation with centralized identity and event-driven coordination.
Project constraints
- Three roles with different permissions
- Independent domain services
- JWT propagation between services
- Synchronous and asynchronous communication
- Several persistence technologies
02 / Architecture
Clear boundaries.
Purposeful layers.
Experience
React role-specific dashboards and protected routes for administrators, teachers and students.
Edge
Spring Cloud Gateway centralizes routing and token validation; Eureka provides discovery.
Domains
Independent user, academic, grade, complaint and class-level services.
Integration
OpenFeign for request-response flows and RabbitMQ for domain events.
03 / Engineering decisions
Trade-offs made
explicit.
Centralize identity in Keycloak
OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect avoid duplicating credentials and role policy across services.
Use events for cross-domain notifications
Enrollment, grade and complaint events reduce direct coupling between bounded contexts.
Choose storage by service need
MySQL, MongoDB and H2 demonstrate independent persistence rather than one shared database.
04 / System toolkit
A stack assembled
for the problem.
Every technology earns its place in the architecture. The interactive field represents the system's core building blocks.
05 / Outcomes
What the project
actually delivered.
Delivered
- Five domain-oriented services behind one gateway
- Administrator, teacher and student experiences
- Keycloak-based authorization across frontend and backend
- A complete Docker Compose environment
Next validation steps
- Add distributed tracing and correlation IDs
- Define service-level contracts with consumer-driven tests
- Measure operational cost against a modular-monolith alternative
06 / Product in context