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A Reproducible, Infrastructure-as-Code-Ready CI/CD System for a Smart Education Platform: Implementation and Local Evaluation

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Smart education platforms need frequent, reliable releases, and institutions increasingly want to run them on more than one cloud. CI/CD reliability, infrastructure as code (IaC), cross-cloud DevOps, and cloud DevOps in education have been studied separately, but controlled end-to-end evaluations of an integrated workflow for an education application remain limited. This paper reports the locally evaluated first stage of such a study. We implemented a Smart Education Platform (React, Node.js/Express, MongoDB, Nginx), packaged it with Docker, and verified it with a five-job GitHub Actions workflow. Terraform configurations design AWS ECS Fargate and Azure Container Apps environments that share one commit-SHA image model, and an approval-gated, OpenID Connect-authenticated Azure release workflow adds a plan-scope policy, smoke tests, and rollback; neither environment has been deployed. A layered validation protocol was executed twice, a day apart, with identical results: 48 backend tests against MongoDB, 28 frontend tests, a 38-check real-browser journey, and offline IaC tests passed, and all 10 hosted CI runs succeeded. Static analysis found 40 failed Checkov policies, concentrated in encryption, and outdated base-image packages. In 12 k6 runs (795,308 requests, no failures), one Node.js process saturated a CPU core at about 480 requests/s, and Nginx cost 16–17% of throughput. In a controlled comparison against this baseline, four backend replicas raised step-load throughput 1.93-fold and lowered p99 latency. No cloud deployment or cloud benchmarking was performed, so cloud deployment time, cost, scalability, and portability remain future work.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24029130
Institution: Alliance University
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225456554
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