How Do I Move SAS® Applications to a Public Cloud? Q&A, Slides, and On-Demand Recording
Did you miss the Ask the Expert session on moving your SAS® applications to a public cloud? Not to worry, you can catch it on-demand at your leisure.
Learn important performance considerations for SAS® 9 and SAS® Viya® when hosted in any available public clouds and how to configure the cloud infrastructure to get the best performance with SAS. During this webinar, we cover:
- What instance type to use.
- How to use the correct storage type.
- Which shared file system to use when deploying SAS Grid Manager.
- Where to place SAS components.
- If high availability and security are required.
Here are the questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar. The slides from the webinar are attached.
Does SAS recommend a particular cloud provider?
SAS has a new strategic partnership with Microsoft so we are doing a lot of work with Azure, but we can support any of the cloud providers. It depends on what you want to do and how much you want to spend which cloud provider will be best for your needs.
Is the public cloud free and how do I get space on it?
No, there is a fee for cloud space. You can look at the instance type you need to determine the cost.
Are the performance metrics you shared when running on individual nodes or running parallel on multiple nodes?
We look at each individual node. I run NMOMN (script from IBM) on each individual node.
What is the most common issue with moving to a public cloud?
The group spinning up the instances don’t know 100% what is needed to support SAS. Another issue I’ve seen is that customers are changing their underlying storage. You need to understand if the new storage can meet the IO throughput to meet your SAS SLAs. We’re seeing users move and not have the same performance as before. You will need to discuss the cost of putting the instances in place to meet your SLAs. Best to do this in your planning rather than after you’ve moved.
We have a SPD server - any recommendations when going to cloud with SPD? We have the IBM scheduler too as a 3rd party.
SPD works fine in the public cloud. My team has recently tested it for a large bank in the UK who is looking to move their existing SAS 9.4 Grid to MS Azure.
On the slide for Compute Resources Being Used: What are the SAS recommended for each?
This is a hard question to answer without better context. For CPUs, you should keep it below 85% busy for long periods of time. For memory, 100% used WITHOUT any paging/swapping to disk is ideal. For IO throughput, having it be just below what your hardware can sustain is best.
Azure instance example SSD was 1.2 TB temp space. We need at least 2 TB of temp space so for Azure we would need to set up persistent storage to accommodate, correct?
Yes, you may need to set up persistent storage. Or you can move up to the E64 instance where the temp space is 2 TB. Please consult with your account executive to create a plan for your specific situation.
We provide software written in SAS to one of our clients. The client is saying that they are moving to cloud and we are asked to convert all our SAS programs to Python? Do we have to convert our SAS software to Python? Is there an alternate option?
No, you don’t have to convert your SAS programs to Python. Your customer can run SAS in the cloud. Please reach out to your account rep to have a 1:1 discussion about your particular situation.
Can you please explain the purpose of a CAS tier - does it allow Viya to use Grid resource? If connecting Cloud base Viya to on prem Grid where does CAS tier sit?
The CAS tier of SAS Viya is SAS’ new software direction where we move all the data into memory and then process it there – no more large block sequential IO to SAS temporary space like we did in SAS 9. CAS is more MPP aware and places data and computation across all the CAS workers that you have. SAS 9.4 Grid schedules jobs to run on a single machine within your SAS Compute nodes. No SAS Grid functionality features in CAS right now, but we’re working on that for 2021.
SAS Tech Support provides scripts and utilities to measure the I/O throughput for On-Prem deployments. Do you have something equivalent for Cloud Deployments?
Yes, there is a IO throughput test you can run. It’s a script you can run on any RHEL system, even before you install SAS. https://support.sas.com/kb/59/680.html If you need a script to run on a non-RHEL system, please reach out to your SAS account or customer service team.
If we have SAS BI and SAS Viya, do you recommend getting both to the same?
I am not sure how to address this question, please work with your SAS account or customer service team to set up a call to discuss this further.
Who should I reach out to for help planning my move to the public cloud?
Work with your account and customer success teams on your plan to move to the public cloud. These teams can pull in other teams within SAS, such as the Enterprise Excellence Center (EEC).
Recommended Resources
SAS Global Forum Paper: Important Performance Considerations When Moving SAS® to a Public Cloud
SAS Global Forum Video: Important Performance Considerations When Moving SAS® to a Public Cloud
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