In 2019, Information Systems & Technology (IST) issued a request for proposal (RFP) for a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment to host the University’s next generation Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) 3.0 ecosystem.
We are pleased to announce that, earlier this year, the RFP was awarded to Pantheon. Pantheon is one of the largest cloud-based Drupal PaaS hosting providers and has a significant footprint in both Canadian and US Higher Education. As WCMS 3.0 rolls out later this year, all newly created and migrated WCMS 3.0 sites will be hosted on the Pantheon platform and data stored in their Canadian Data Centre.
This Platform-as-a-Service model gives the University the certainty of regular, continuous releases to the underlying technologies that run the WCMS, as well as enhanced Continuous Integration tools that will help IST significantly reduce the time required to publish updates to the WCMS. This new model also gives IST the ability to dynamically scale website performance based on real-time demand, and with Pantheon’s Content Distribution Network, performance of WCMS-hosted sites for international audiences will be significantly enhanced.