Accessing & Deploying a Third Integrated Sandbox Environment

Tiffany Winters

Modified on: Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 4:59 PM

Table of Contents

Overview

By default, Coursedog provides two instances of our application: a staging instance and a production instance.
In general, the production environment is used for live use of the product and the staging environment is used for testing changes prior to rolling them out in production. Each of these environments is integrated with our standard integration with your SIS.
In some cases, a customer may require a third integrated instance to execute validation/QA prior to promoting changes to production.
Use cases and the process for requesting a third instance are both outlined below.

One example use case is when a customer has a required deployment methodology that requires sign off on multiple non-production systems in the march towards eventual production deployment (i.e. Development > QA > PROD).
Another example use case is when a partner would like to test API operations and does not want to worry about overwriting staging data. In this case, we more often than not would recommend enabling Read Only API User Access within the existing staging environment, which will protect the data integrity in that environment, but in the case of a need for significant API write functions, the third integrated environment may be necessary to protect data integrity of the first staging instance.

Work with your Account Representative (sales rep), Customer Success Manager (CSM), or Project Manager (PM) to have a line item added to your contract for a third instance.
Once the contract is signed for the third instance, it will take 1-2 months to have the instance stood up, as it will require a mini-project from Coursedog resources to get it ready.

Here’s what happens after the contract has been signed:

The Project Manager creates the staging environment with a name that clarifies the distinction between the first staging environment and the second staging environment.
The project manager works with Coursedog resources to request a clone of Production or Staging to create the second staging instance (only if the partner would like to have configurations copied over).
The customer adds institution users to the environment manually since cloning users from staging to staging would create conflicts.
Your Coursedog Data Engineer oversees the integration-related work and works with integration partners to complete the integration wiring.
The customer executes User Acceptance Testing (UAT) once the system is up and running and provides sign off to the Project Manager.