Ahmed Belhaj
All systems

Platform architecture

MTN Cameroon E-Campus

National telecom learning platform on AWS ECS Fargate — Moodle, React, Celery payment services, and carrier-billing fraud protection.

ECS FargateMoodleReactCeleryRDS MySQLElastiCacheCloudFrontAWS CDKEvina DCBprotect

The challenge

MTN Cameroon needed a learning platform for its subscriber base — not a single-institution deployment. The architecture had to support carrier-grade reliability, mobile payment flows, direct carrier billing (DCB) with fraud screening, and coordinated delivery across operator, platform, and vendor teams.

Requirements

  • Production stack deployed with end-to-end integrations validated
  • Operator-wide public rollout pending final launch approval
  • DCB fraud screening required before any billing event
  • Multi-AZ encrypted RDS; Redis for Moodle session caching
  • 11-person program across Campusna, Evina, and MTN teams
  • Engineering delivery from Tunisia to Cameroon operator infrastructure

Architecture

Five ECS Fargate services run in a dedicated cluster: Moodle LMS, payment API, Celery workers, beat scheduler, and payment frontend. Infrastructure is defined in CDK (mtn-ecs-moodle-stack). Traffic enters through CloudFront and terminates at an application load balancer.

Payments & fraud

Payment infrastructure is a first-class part of the platform. The payment API integrates carrier billing with Evina DCBprotect for real-time fraud detection before charges are processed. Celery workers handle asynchronous payment jobs.

Backend optimization on the payment and API layer delivered roughly 40% performance improvement.

Fraud screening runs in the synchronous request path — not as a post-hoc audit.

Program delivery

Delivery spanned operator UAT, fraud vendor integration, and internal platform teams. I led technical architecture, third-party integrations, and cross-team coordination throughout the program.

Service map

Production runs as containerized services on ECS Fargate — Moodle LMS, React frontend, payment API with async workers, and supporting data stores. Infrastructure is maintained as code by the Campusna platform team.

  • Moodle LMS — core learning management on Fargate
  • React SPA — learner-facing frontend behind CloudFront
  • Payment API — carrier billing with Celery workers and beat scheduler
  • Workspace API — supporting learner workspace features
  • Custom Moodle base image — production hardening including malware scanning
  • CDK-defined ECS stack — VPC, ALB, RDS, Redis, and autoscaling policies

Current status

The production environment is live at mtn-e-campus.campusna.com. Infrastructure is operational and integrations are validated. Operator rollout to the full subscriber base is the next milestone; approximately 2,000 users pre-registered during the validation phase.

Results

5
ECS Fargate services
Moodle, payment API, workers, beat, and frontend
~40%
Payment/API performance gain
Backend optimization on the integration layer
~2,000
Pre-registered users
During validation, before operator-wide launch
11
Cross-functional stakeholders
Campusna, Evina, and MTN program teams

Key decisions

ECS Fargate for production

After retiring the organization-wide EKS platform in late 2025, MTN production moved to Fargate — lower operational overhead for Moodle and payment microservices, with the full stack codified in CDK.

Payment services separate from Moodle

Payment API, workers, and frontend deploy independently from the LMS — enabling separate scaling and release cycles for the billing path.

Fraud before billing

Evina DCBprotect integration is mandatory in the payment flow — a requirement for operator partnerships on carrier billing.

Private data plane

RDS runs in private subnets with Multi-AZ encryption. Only CloudFront and the load balancer are internet-facing.

My role

  • Architecture and delivery lead at Campusna — ECS topology, service design, and CDK direction
  • Led payment middleware and Evina DCBprotect integration
  • Program coordination across Campusna, Evina, and MTN (11 stakeholders)
  • Production deployment, operations, and cloud infrastructure strategy

FAQ

What was Ahmed Belhaj’s role on MTN E-Campus?
As Technical Manager at Campusna, Ahmed led technical architecture, payment and fraud integrations, and coordination across 11 stakeholders for MTN Cameroon’s national telecom LMS on AWS ECS Fargate.
Is MTN E-Campus live?
Yes — the production environment is publicly reachable at mtn-e-campus.campusna.com. Architecture details are on this site under Systems and Case Studies.