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MicroMasters — Architecture & Data Flows

Generated 2026-06-24 13:33 UTC · c4gen dev

MicroMasters is MIT's program platform pairing online edX/MITx Online course runs with a proctored exam to award a verified credential. A Django monolith serves a webpack/React SPA, exposes a public catalog + Wagtail CMS pages API that MIT Learn ingests, syncs enrollments/grades/certificates from Open edX and MITx Online, runs learner-search indexing over OpenSearch, and drives Celery batch jobs (enrollment refresh, grade freezing, exam authorization).

This is a C4 view of MicroMasters within the MIT Open Learning SOA, focused on how data is created and propagated — synchronous request paths and asynchronous (queued, scheduled, event-driven) flows alike. Use it for onboarding and as a holistic reference when realigning flows or hunting harmful cycles and fragile linkages.

How to read these diagrams

These are C4 model diagrams (C4-PlantUML). Read them top-down: System Context (the whole SOA) → Container (one system's runtime units) → Dynamic (a single data flow, step by step).

  • People are rounded boxes; systems and containers are rectangles; databases and queues have distinct shapes.
  • Each arrow is a data flow labelled with what moves.
  • Solid arrows are synchronous (request/response, caller blocks).
  • Amber dashed arrows are asynchronous (queued, scheduled, or event-driven — caller does not block).
  • Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. Boxes with a link drill into the next level.

Contents

  1. System Context — MicroMasters and the systems it exchanges data with.
  2. Containers — the runtime units inside MicroMasters.
  3. Data Flows — key interactions, step by step (sync & async).
  4. Dependencies & Cycles — graph-derived coupling, cycles, fragile links.

Keeping this current

These pages are generated from a structured model by architecture_maps/c4gen. The cross-service edges are extracted deterministically from the witan-code graph; node prose and scenarios are curated. See the generator README to regenerate after the system changes.