Autoscaling the CAS Server on Viya on AWS?

[EyalGonen]

Hi experts,

Does SAS Viya support Autoscaling using the Horizontal Pod Scaler for the CAS Server?

For example, if I start with an MPP CAS with 4 nodes and then many requests for CAS come in and CAS resources are highly utilized can it automatically spin up additional CAS pods on new CAS nodes? 

I found no such indication for such a capability but not 100% sure.

If no such capability exists then how is elasticity handled for CAS? Is there any doc about it?

Thanks

[EyalGonen]

Anyone?

Assuming this is not currently possible are there plans to add this functionality in the future?

[gwootton]

I'm not aware of any way to autoscale CAS. The number of CAS workers is defined in the CAS deployment custom resource object that the CAS operator uses to determine how many worker pods to create.

[EyalGonen]

Hi @gwootton , thanks. Do you know if  there are plans to add this functionality in the future?

[gwootton]

I don't know if anything is in the works, it may be worth submitting a product suggestion:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Product-Suggestions/idb-p/product-suggestions

[Patrick]

I believe the following Community Articles will interest you:

• Scaling CAS part 1: Add more workers with DAC
• Scaling CAS part 2: Increase worker size with IAC
• Scaling to new heights. Exploring the auto-scaling capabilities of Viya Workload Management

Adding worker nodes won't improve performance for existing CAS tables if you don't rebalance the tables (=move some of the data to the new workers). 

Starting with version 2023.09, automatic table rebalancing is available. Just be aware that such rebalancing leads to significant data movement which in turn will impact on overall CAS performance until finished. I feel a controlled and managed strategy which tables to rebalance when needs to be part of scaling - which in turn means that not all tables should just auto-scale and that some scripted approach might be required.