Overview

SAS® has long provided the market-leading analytics platform, adding SAS Viya alongside with their legacy SAS 9 technologies. SAS Viya delivers a high-speed in-memory platform, enabling Data Scientists to discover more than ever with SAS analytics. Given the long successful history of SAS 9 and SAS Grid, as well, using both technologies together makes perfect sense. For a quick overview:

•  SAS 9 Foundation – flagship legacy technology, supporting multiple users in server-based deployments.
• SAS 9 Grid – enhances SAS 9 Foundation to execute jobs in parallel across multiple servers.
• SAS Viya – enables SAS to leverage in-memory processing, parallelized across multiple instances.

This combined architecture can be deployed quickly in Microsoft® Azure to deliver a cohesive platform. Leveraging Azure’s ability to support automated deployments with Azure Resource Templates, we (Core Compete) have created deployment Quickstarts that support:

• Either SAS 9 or SAS 9 Grid with SAS Viya 3.5
• Either SMP (single server) or MPP (multiple parallel servers) for SAS Viya 3.5

The SAS 9 & Viya QuickStart for Azure takes a SAS provided license package for SAS 9, Viya and deploy a well-architected SAS platform into the customer’s Azure subscription. The deployment creates a virtual network and other required infrastructure. After the deployment process completes, you will have the necessary details for the endpoints and connection details to log in to the new SAS Ecosystem. By default, QuickStart deployments enable Transport Layer Security (TLS) for secure communication.

What Gets Set Up?

The QuickStart will setup the following environment on Microsoft Azure:

•  A Virtual Network (VNet) configured with public and private subnets. This provides the network infrastructure for your SAS 94 and SAS Viya deployments.
•  In the public subnet, a Linux bastion host acting as an Ansible Controller Host.
• In the private subnet, a Remote Desktop instance acting as a Client Machine.
• In the Application subnet (private subnet), Virtual Machines for:
• SAS 9.4 – Metadata, Compute, and Mid-Tier Servers
• SAS Grid – Metadata, Grid Controller, Grid Nodes, and Mid-Tier Servers
• SAS Viya – Microservices, SPRE, Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) Controller, and CAS Workers Servers