Cloud Course Registration System

a C++ socket project deployed on AWS

code link

Web registration system is the crucial place for students to plan their future courses. When registration for a new semester begins, hundreds of students will flood into the registration website. In such a situation, a stable and efficient system is indispensable.

In this project, I built a course registration backend using sockets, which provides fast and reliable connections between hundreds of clients and our servers. It includes five communication end-points:

  • Client: used by a student to access the registration system
  • Main server (serverM): coordinate with the backend servers
  • Credential server (serverC): verify the identity of the student
  • Department servers (serverCS and serverEE): store the information of courses offered by this department

Input data:

  • Credential server: cred.txt for encrypted usernames and passwords
  • Department servers: ee.txt and cs.txt for course information

I implemented both TCP and UDP sockets for connection, with a TCP socket for client-serverM communication, and UDP sockets for all backend servers’ communication.

The code is written in C++ and built in the linux environment, you can access it here. After learning cloud computing with AWS, I deployed it onto AWS EC2 instances. I assigned a VPC for all the backend servers to ensure an isolated working space, and then associated an elastic IP for the public interface of the main server.

After all the implementations are completed, clients can now access from outside to this system to login, and acquire information about the course they want to register.

Here’s a demo for the application.

Backup for the demo is on YouTube