CAS Migration to the Cloud
Overview
Liaison is migrating our Centralized Application Service (CAS) (i.e., the student application) to the cloud. This strategic move builds upon our prior successful migrations of other integral components of the CAS infrastructure, including the CAS API and the WebAdMIT production environment. This exciting transition allows for greater scalability, faster response times, and improved security.
The migration will occur in two stages.
Stage 1: Prelaunch Migration (Completed)
We migrated our prelaunch environment – including WebAdMIT prelaunch – the weekend of December 15, 2023. The prelaunch environment is a test environment, typically used to configure and test programs before they go live.
Stage 2: Production Migration (Completed)
We will migrate our production environment from January 20, 2024 at 7 AM ET through January 22, 2024 at 7 AM ET. The production environment is the live environment where applicants complete their applications and admissions and associations users perform their daily tasks.
During this time, the following platforms and functions will be impacted for production environments only:
- Analytics by Liaison: unavailable to admissions users.
- Applicant Gateway: unavailable to applicants.
- Applicant Portal: unavailable to applicants.
- CAS API: unavailable to admissions users (i.e., data retrieval and subscription management will be unavailable).
- Configuration Portal: unavailable to admissions users.
- Letters by Liaison: unavailable to recommenders.
- Liaison Outcomes: accessible to admissions users.
- WebAdMIT: accessible to admissions users, but PDFs will be unavailable (other functions may be unavailable).
Once the migration is complete, users can access these platforms and functions as usual.
Important Note for CAS API Users
If you're using the CAS API to pull applications into on-campus systems, you may need to update your firewall rules as our IP addresses will change.
Notify your IT team of these changes as soon as possible so they can assess any potential effects on data movement. They may need to safe-list the following comprehensive list of new IP address ranges: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json. Note that as part of our ongoing preparedness efforts, we've already enabled IP addresses in the full range for failover events.
Applicant Notification
Liaison is adding rotating banner notifications in the application and messages to the support phone lines. If schools wish to alert their applicants, we recommend using the following language:
"The CAS application will be undergoing maintenance from Saturday, January 20 at 7 AM ET through Monday, January 22 at 7 AM ET. During this time, the application will be unavailable. Please plan accordingly. If you have any program-related deadlines during this period, we recommend submitting your materials in advance."