Scholarship and student exchange opportunities are abundant, yet discovery remains fragmented across university portals, scattered forums, and unindexed threads. Critical deadlines get missed, and qualified applicants struggle to access tailored guidance from past awardees.
Scho-Infinity was built during the APIE Advanced Camp to bridge this gap. The platform consolidates opportunities into a single curated catalog, matches students using a weighted matchmaking algorithm, and facilitates structured one-on-one mentorship sessions. Beyond the application features, my primary objective was engineering a resilient, secure hybrid cloud infrastructure capable of zero-downtime rollouts, private data transit, and high availability.
My Role
As the Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer, I owned the end-to-end network topology, deployment pipelines, and operational monitoring stack:
- Designing the hybrid cloud architecture connecting AWS public cloud resources with on-premise infrastructure
- Configuring the AWS VPC, multi-AZ EC2 compute tiers, and Elastic Load Balancer routing
- Bridging the AWS environment and the on-premise network using a point-to-point WireGuard VPN tunnel
- Setting up the on-premise database proxy layer with HAProxy for automatic failover across MySQL replicas
- Structuring edge ingress and routing through Cloudflare reverse proxy rules
Core Features
The platform focuses on two primary user flows: opportunity discovery and mentor connection.
Scholarship Discovery & Tracking
Students can search, filter, and track scholarship opportunities tailored to their academic background.
The discovery engine filters programs by country, academic level, and funding scope. Each entry includes requirements, deadlines, and a direct application tracker that alerts candidates as dates approach.
Behind the discovery views sits a smart matchmaking algorithm. The engine first executes SQL filtering against hard prerequisites (GPA, study level, nationality, major, and language proficiencies) before calculating a weighted sum score:
- Interest similarity: 35%
- Major match: 25%
- Preferred country: 15%
- Deadline urgency: 10%
- Funding amount: 10%
- Language match: 5%
Mentorship Booking
To help students navigate complex applications, Scho-Infinity enables direct 1-on-1 booking with verified scholarship alumni.
Applicants can inspect mentor backgrounds, target scholarships, review ratings, and select available hourly time slots. Once a session topic is submitted, the booking moves through mock checkout and updates both student and mentor dashboards in real time.
System Architecture
The core of my work was designing a hybrid cloud architecture balancing scalability, traffic security, and database isolation.
The platform architecture divides traffic routing, compute workloads, and data persistence across discrete layers:
Edge Protection & Ingress Routing
Public HTTPS traffic enters through Cloudflare, which handles TLS termination, DDoS filtering, and WAF rules at the edge. Clean requests are forwarded to an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ALB) provisioned inside a custom AWS VPC.
Multi-AZ Compute Tier
The ALB balances incoming HTTP traffic across multiple EC2 application instances distributed over distinct Availability Zones (us-east-1a and us-east-1b). This setup provides horizontal elasticity and enables zero-downtime rolling maintenance without interrupting active users.
Encrypted WireGuard Tunneling
To protect user records and comply with data sovereignty constraints, the primary database layer is hosted in an isolated on-premise private network rather than an open public subnet. A dedicated point-to-point WireGuard VPN tunnel links the AWS VPC (10.100.100.1 and 10.100.100.3) directly with the on-premise gateway (10.100.100.2), keeping all internal database traffic encrypted in flight without public endpoint exposure.
High-Availability HAProxy & MySQL
On-premise database queries pass through HAProxy, which acts as the single database access gateway. HAProxy continuously probes the primary MySQL instance. If an unrecoverable failure occurs, it redirects connection pools to hot standbys (MySQL Replica #1 / Replica #2), preserving uptime and transaction consistency.
Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD)
While my core focus remained on the network topology and hybrid infrastructure, our team established an automated CI/CD workflow via GitHub Actions to streamline software delivery across the cluster.
Pushing updates to the main branch triggers parallel deployments across the active EC2 compute instances over SSH. Each pipeline execution runs automated health checks against the newly spawned instances prior to routing traffic. If an endpoint fails post-deployment validation, the job halts immediately, preventing faulty application builds from serving live requests.
Monitoring & Observability
To complement the network architecture and verify cluster health across both cloud and on-premise components, my teammates set up a dedicated observability layer:
- Uptime Kuma: Hosted on a dedicated EC2 monitoring node to continuously probe external API health, record response latencies, and track TLS certificate validity periods.
- Netdata: Lightweight agent daemons running across the EC2 application nodes to stream real-time operating metrics—including CPU load, memory utilization, disk I/O, and per-interface network throughput—directly to an operational dashboard.
Final Thoughts
Building Scho-Infinity reinforced that reliable platform engineering often hinges on the networking layer that ties services together. Configuring a hybrid architecture—combining public cloud elasticity on AWS with an encrypted WireGuard bridge to on-premise database failover clusters—demanded deliberate network planning, automated pipelines, and tight operational feedback. The resulting system achieved operational resilience without compromising data security.
But honestly, the hardest part and the funniest part is to work with people across different region. With different language and different timezone to tackle, we had to finish our job. Sometimes we didn't understand each other, but we always find a way to communicate and solve the problem. This experience taught me the importance of communication and teamwork.
Shoot out for my teammates!