SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

databedbath — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 19:50:13 GMT

Dear SAS Community,

Please share your experience deploying SAS marketing automation solution in the cloud especially on google cloud platform.

The plan is to deploy 3 tier architecture in the cloud - meta, compute and mid

1. any challenges

2. best practices

3. considering these databases - PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Oracle

Re: SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

Dmitry_Alergant — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:38:34 GMT

Hi,

We've deployed SAS Marketing Automation (and also regular SAS 9.4 analytical environments) to our clients in AWS many times, at least one in Azure, and currently starting a pilot in the Google Cloud.

If you PM me, I can connect you with the person involved in this pilot so you could stay informed.

In general, there are exist many good SAS papers about this topic, such as
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/Implementing-SAS9-4-Software-Cloud-Infrastructures.pdf
https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2019/3363-2019.pdf
(and there are many others, easily googleable).

Most of these papers would be about SAS 9.4 platform (not SAS Marketing Automation specifically), but SAS MA is SAS 9.4, so many recommendations from such papers are still fully applicable. There's really not much SAS MA product specifics that would affect environment deployments in the cloud. It's very important to place SASWorks on local ephemeral SSD storage (ideally, NVMe based) - all clouds support that with certain specific instance types, Google also allows attaching multiple Local SSD Drives to general-purpose instances (N1 and N2) - you will have to stripe them together with "mdadm". But again, this is also a general platform-specific recommendation mentioned in the papers above.

Good thing though is that if the environment is only used for SAS Marketing Automation needs (and not as a general-purpose analytical sandbox for SAS EG/SAS Studio users), then you largely avoid most of the heavy I/O dependency on permanent storage drives (except for SASWork) - which is otherwise a big issue for many generic analytical SAS 9.4 platform deployments (analytical sandboxes) in public clouds, and which (issue) is covered in details in some of the papers mentioned above. But you still need to place SASWorks on fast and local (ephemeral) NVME-based SSD drives. Still, watch out for network throughput between your SAS Compute node and the Database server. Network throughput limits per instance are well-documented in Amazon and Azure clouds, but not so easy to find for Google Cloud.

Domain User Authentication (and IWA/Single Sign-On) are often becoming a hot and sometimes problematic topic in cloud deployments, depending on the general state of public cloud adoption in your company (whether your domain is already replicated to this cloud, etc.), additional authentication mechanisms used in the organization (dual-factor, etc.).

Choice, sizing, and configuration of a database is very important for a successful SAS Marketing Automation implementation, but I guess you already know that very well. We've run SAS MA successfully with all 3 mentioned databases (though Oracle being most popular), including in some cases for quite significant workloads and datamart sizes. Database choice considerations and deployment specifics are too client-specific and I don't think anyone can give you general advice on that, without access to additional details. There so be many factors in play, including database licensing / pricing, application migration complexity (I guess you are upgrading an existing SAS MA environment into the cloud), ETL development, query performance, backup/recovery/high-availability approaches, etc.

Happy to start a dialogue and help you with more specific recommendations and advice, especially if you have more specific questions or concerns. Feel free to send a PM.

Good Luck, and have a Happy New Year!

Re: SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

databedbath — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 17:27:52 GMT

Hi Dmitry,

Thank you for the detailed response.

You are correct the environment will comprise other SAS 9.4 analytical tools along with SAS MA.

I have managed SAS 9.4 in AWS but without SAS MA.

I'm very keen to know about your GCP pilot, I'll PM you.

Regards,

Re: SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

Dmitry_Alergant — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 18:01:28 GMT

Also, one more important note: currently available latest product release is SAS Marketing Automation is version 6.5, which is at least 3 years old at this point. Without being too specific, I'd say that it may be due for the next version upgrade, which might bring some important changes, that you may then want to deploy as soon as it is available (if and when it is released)...

Make sure you are in touch with your SAS account representative and discussed SAS's plans on the product roadmap and upcoming upgrades - to avoid the situation where you spent efforts on a cloud migration project of v6.5 only to face the need to install a next version upgrade very shortly afterward.

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SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

Re: SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

Re: SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform

Re: SAS marketing automation in the cloud especially on google cloud platform