Sisu is hosted on a cloud environment, and mobile device access is noteworthy in the second edition of 2021

- 20/08/2021

 

At the beginning of this month, thousands of students counted the seconds to midnight on Tuesday (03/08). That night, candidates from all over the country could start registering for Sisu (Unified Selection System) for a chance to get one of the 62,365 spots in free, public higher education institutions. For the second edition of the year of the event by the Ministry of Education (MEC), 365,495 users completed 697,764 registrations  (each candidate could select up to two options of programs and institutions).

Every year, edition after edition, Sisu receives tens of thousands of concurrent connections during the registration period. To support the demand and high volume of accesses, it is necessary to rely on a resilient, elastic, scalable, stable, agile, and safe infrastructure, which can be expanded according to demand. That is why, in 2020, RNP worked to redesign, optimize, and modernize the architecture of Sisu, migrating the portal to a cloud environment and, from then on, operating and maintaining the system.

As a result of this operation, in partnership with MEC, is it possible to provide stable navigation so that users of the portal can register without problems. That was what happened in the last edition, once again. Even when the portal has reached peak volumes of registrations per minute (1,125) and concurrent users (12,200), it remained available.

Another interesting fact is that the preference of users for accessing Sisu using mobile devices continues to grow. 78.42% of the accesses come from cell phones and tablets, and only 21% from computers. 

What the representatives of the institutions involved have to say:

 

Edimilson Costa, diretor de Políticas e Programas de Educação Superior da Secretaria de Educação Superior do Ministério da Educação

Edimilson Costa, Director of Higher Education Policies and Programs of the Secretary of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education:

"At the Secretary of Higher Education of the MEC, we have the great challenge of managing Sisu, the main tool responsible for selecting students based on their grades from the National Upper Secondary Education Exam (ENEM) to enter public institutions. All students who sat for Enem 2020 and did not get zero in their writing task, with the exception of trainees, could register for Sisu. Therefore, the demand for the system is as huge as Enem, which is the second greatest exam of this nature in the world, behind only one that happens in China. To meet this demand for Sisu, which had faced problems in the registration system, RNP proposed migrating the data to a cloud environment. Its work with the Undersecretary of Information and Communication Technology (STIC) of MEC involves from the preparation and registration period, all the way to the routines after the waiting lists are closed.  The partnership with RNP is vital for a good implementation of Sisu. All the work carried out with STIC has provided security to new challenges. An example of that is the significant increase in the number of simultaneous access to the system in the first edition of Sisu in 2021. Another challenge was the record number of registrations in one day, in comparison to all previous editions of Sisu when 1.467 million registrations were recorded on 06/04 of this year. MEC's partnership with RNP, which also involves the Digital Diploma Program, is the result of a major investment effort by MEC to improve the electronic systems of Sisu, but not only that, it also includes the systems of two other programs of access to higher education, Prouni and Fies".

André Castro, Subsecretário de Tecnologia da Informação e Comunicação do Ministério da Educação

André Castro, Undersecretary of Information and Communication Technology of the Ministry of Education

"We know that students' anxiety is huge during this period. For many, it is the opportunity of a lifetime they are dealing with, opportunities to change the future of generations to come and make every effort and investment of recent years count. We have all gone through this stage at some level and can have empathy towards our users, the students. So this is not just a public service, but an instrument for making dreams come true! Therefore, we care about providing a good user experience, ensuring maximum availability and response time in system interactions, without forgetting that we are dealing with public resources in its operationalization. Ensuring an environment suitable to the needs and that enables immediate actions for adjusting the solution to support these peaks of volumes is vital for the outcomes of the program. One point that deserves attention is that the resource does not generate results by itself; it is not self-operable, particularly regarding the optimization of computational resources and costs. Having specialized teams to establish a work schedule for months of operations in only a week is crucial. A comparison with this Olympic is worth making. Athletes need to prepare for years to reap results in the two weeks of the event. The same goes for our students. In the same way, it takes years of work to build a favorable environment so that competitions are held with a large number of people. Therefore, it is like our work with RNP, with the optimization of environments, tests, and adjustments of product versions, validations of safety and capacity aspects, among others. We are sure that we are putting in the energy and resources needed with partners capable of generating the expected value".

Antônio Carlos F. Nunes, diretor de Serviços e Soluções da RNP

Antônio Carlos F. Nunes, director of Services and Solutions of RNP
"Each year, we need to evolve the environment available on the cloud, providing the best possible experience for millions of students who seek a spot in quality public higher education. In addition, our goal is to have the best results from the investments made, something that is not limited to the days of registration and publishing of results, but includes a long journey of planning, preparation, and tests that lead to the positive outcomes of the last editions of Sisu, one of the main structuring systems for education in the country."

Alberto Yasuda, gerente de Projetos Digitais para Clientes da RNP


Alberto Yasuda, Manager of Digital projects for RNP Clients

"Long before Sisu begins, there is intense work to prepare the cloud infrastructure, application architecture, and security, which includes several tests so that everything is parametrized and the portal can support the volume of requests when the time comes. During the registration period, the technical team works on control and operations using various monitoring tools to ensure that thousands of candidates can register in the selection process with no interruption of the service. The data collected by the monitoring tools serve as input to provide candidates with high availability and quality of service."

Roosevelt Benvindo, gerente de Soluções da RNP

Roosevelt Benvindo, Solutions manager at RNP
"The articulation challenge to make Sisu available and operational was huge due to the limitations imposed by the pandemic and the care that RNP had with its employees. Considering that, I'm very happy with the results, which showed the technical competence of RNP, as well as the power of articulation and management of the initiatives for the success of the event".

 

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