Great question Deborah.

Cloud Analytics Services (CAS server) is part of SAS Viya. CAS is a in-memory distributed analytics engine built for big data and resource intensive programs. It also uses a variety of other SAS applications and integrates with open source programming languages like Python, R and more. You can find more information on SAS Viya and applications here: https://www.sas.com/en_us/software/viya.html

Now, when you have SAS Viya, you get access to both the traditional SAS compute server (traditional SAS programming) and the CAS server. These posts focus on CAS actions, which only execute in CAS. For an overview of CAS actions and the CAS server you can see the first post in the series: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2021/08/06/cas-actions-and-action-sets-a-brief-intro/

For more detailed information on the CAS server you can check out the CAS fundamentals documentation: https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/v_015/casfun/titlepage.htm

Hope this helps! Feel free to reach out with any other questions.