A Multi-Tenancy System Architecture for Online Examinations
Jonas Andre, Johannes Naab, Benedikt Jaeger, Georg Carle, Leander Seidlitz, Stephan Günther · 2023
Time-synchronous online examinations pose new demands on our infrastructure: lectures with more than 1000 students are common at TUM, and in case of time-synchronous examinations students concurrently download working instructions or submit solutions – with possibly multiple such examinations being conducted at the same time. Furthermore, the architecture has to withstand students that impatiently reload the download page multiple times as well as the sudden increase in traffic at the start and end of an exam. In addition, the architecture has to be resilient against both deliberate attacks of individuals and handling of unsuspecting users.In this paper we discuss our implementation of an examination management platform as multi-tenancy system based on operational requirements, demands on scalability, and bottlenecks we encountered in our attempt to roll out the infrastructure for as many examinations as needed.