The Context — A Certification Exam Under Real Conditions
In May 2026, during my 4th year at EADL (academic year 2025/2026, semester II), I took two RNCP39765 certification exams sharing the same thread — the DIGITRANS-CM project:
- Block BC04 "Optimizing the Information System with Cloud Computing" (competencies C21–C26): the technical side.
- Block BC02 "Managing Digital Projects" (competencies C10–C15): the project-management side — plan, budget, KPIs, team coordination, tech watch and lessons learned.
The reconstructed scenario: CAMTECH SOLUTIONS S.A., a Cameroonian IT services company, just won the DIGITRANS-CM tender launched by AGROCAM S.A., an agro-industrial group with 1,200 employees. The mission: replace a legacy monolithic SI (2009) with a modern, distributed, partially cloud ecosystem — ERP, CRM, Supply Chain and BI. Sensitive data (HR, financial, customer) must stay on Cameroonian soil (Law n°2010/012), and everything must withstand local realities: power outages, uneven connectivity, 150–250 ms latency to European cloud regions.
Format: 3 days, in a team of 3 students. Deliverables assessed by a jury: source code + technical documentation + collective report (Part I), and a 15–20 min individual oral defense (Part II).
The connectivity problem
Field agents work in areas with poor or no internet. Any system requiring a live connection would be unusable for them — and data loss in the field is unacceptable.
The compliance problem
Cameroonian law (n°2010/012) requires HR and financial data to remain on national territory. A pure cloud approach wasn't legally viable.
The traceability problem
The supply chain had no immutable audit trail. Shipment records could be modified after the fact — a liability risk for a food-grade production company.
The scalability problem
The 2009 monolith couldn't be updated modularly. Any change risked breaking unrelated parts of the business.
What I Built
Part I — cloud application & infrastructure (C21–C24):
5 isolated microservices with an API Gateway as the single entry point — centralizing JWT/OAuth2, rate limiting, and acting as a reverse proxy. Business services never validate tokens directly; they trust gateway-injected headers. Each service owns its own PostgreSQL database with dedicated schemas and 17 performance indexes.
Granular RBAC (5 roles): admin, manager, comptable, agent_terrain, analyste — each with a precise access matrix enforced by shared middlewares across all services. A field agent sees only CRM and Supply Chain. An accountant sees only ERP. Zero cross-module data leakage by design.
Offline-first Supply Chain: Designed specifically for field agents in low-connectivity areas. A POST /sync/push endpoint accepts a batch of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations with an offline_id for server-side deduplication. A Redis worker processes the queue every 30 seconds with retry and dead-letter mechanisms — operations logged offline sync automatically when connectivity resumes.
Blockchain traceability (Hyperledger Fabric): Every shipment and supply chain checkpoint is recorded on the Fabric blockchain via a 147-line chaincode. getHistoryForKey() provides complete audit trails. A verifyChainIntegrity() function validates the entire chain — each checkpoint links to the previous via a composite index. Records cannot be altered retroactively.
BI Service (FastAPI/Python): Aggregates KPIs from all services via HTTP with 5-minute Redis cache. Exposes snapshot, trend, and dashboard endpoints — giving management real-time visibility across the entire operation without querying production databases directly.
Hybrid cloud infrastructure: AWS af-south-1 (Cape Town) for compute — ECS Fargate, RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ, ElastiCache Redis, ALB. Azure South Africa North for enterprise identity (Azure AD). On-premise Douala for HR and financial data (legal compliance). Entirely managed by Terraform across 8 modules, with 90-day secret rotation and GuardDuty monitoring.
CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, 5 stages): Lint → Jest tests → Python lint (Ruff) → Docker multi-stage build + ECR push → ECS deploy. Separate environments for staging and production.
Part II — security report (C25–C26): analysis of 4 major cloud risks under the shared responsibility model, multi-role IAM policy, developer offboarding procedure, key rotation, incident response plan, encryption in transit and at rest. Plus the traceability solution: Hyperledger Fabric chosen and justified against project constraints (private enterprise network, latency, local hosting), block structure, adapted consensus, smart contracts hardened against classic vulnerabilities (reentrancy, integer overflow), compliance with Law n°2010/012.
The Project-Management Side — Managing Digital Projects (BC02, C10–C15)
The same project was also assessed on management and steering, not just technical delivery. On the module assigned to me, I produced a complete steering dashboard written in professional language readable by a non-technical CEO:
Project plan & methodology (C10): Work Breakdown Structure of the module with person-day estimates, a Gantt schedule covering the exercise, identification of Cameroon-specific risks (power outages, turnover, software licensing) and an associated mitigation plan.
Team coordination & collaborative tools (C11): sprint log documenting meetings, decisions and problems; Kanban board; versioned Git repo; explicit task allocation; upskilling actions (pair-programming, code reviews).
Budget tracking & KPIs (C12): project budget tracking — 480 M FCFA over 18 months, split across modules — with variance analysis (e.g. +6.5% overrun on the Supply Chain module from customs API integration, offset by under-spend on CRM/BI). Person-day tracking and 5 KPIs: test coverage (≥80%), critical bugs in review (≤3/sprint), CI/CD deploy time (≤15 min), offline-first availability (≥70%), velocity (≥30 SP). For each variance: quantification, root cause, corrective action, and impact on the next contractual milestone.
Technology watch & problem solving (C13): documentation of technical problems encountered, with consulted sources (including English-language ones) and justification of the retained solutions against alternatives.
Progress reviews & lessons learned (C14–C15): formal review minutes (agenda, decisions, actions, owners), and a final lessons-learned session on best practices, improvements and code quality (fewer bugs, removing duplication).
Impact
Delivered in 3 days
Source code, technical documentation, steering report and individual oral defense — as a team of 3, under deadline pressure.
Two certification blocks covered
RNCP39765 — BC04 (C21–C26: cloud, IaC, security, blockchain) and BC02 (C10–C15: plan, budget, KPIs, coordination, lessons learned).
Sovereignty by design
HR and financial data on-premise in Douala, high-load workloads on African cloud regions (AWS af-south-1, Azure South Africa North).
Steering with figures (480 M FCFA)
Steering dashboard: split budget, variance analysis, 5 KPIs, corrective actions and impact on contractual milestones.
Monitoring & Observability
- Prometheus: Scrapes all 5 service health endpoints, Redis, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes nodes
- Grafana: 7-panel dashboard (service status, CPU/memory, Redis hit ratio, PG connections, 5xx errors, recent error logs)
- CloudWatch: 10 widgets including ALB latency/p99, RDS IOPS, Redis hit/miss, estimated costs
- Alerting: 7 Prometheus rules covering ServiceDown, HighErrorRate, HighLatency, HighCPU, PGConnectionsHigh, RedisCacheMissHigh, DiskSpaceLow
What This Experience Taught Me
Three days to deliver a complete SI forces you to make decisions: you don't have the luxury of infinite options, and every architectural choice must be defensible in front of a jury. I learned to justify decisions — Terraform over CloudFormation, Hyperledger over Ethereum, African cloud regions over European ones — and to produce deliverables readable by a third party. Working as three people on indivisible deliverables also teaches you how to split the work without breaking overall coherence.