ALternative approach to Python installaiton/deployment on SAS Viya 4 on AWS

[thesasuser]

Hello
I am working on the deployment/install on Python on SAS Viya4.
I am following the procedure as prescribed in https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Using-the-SAS-Configurator-for-Open-Source-to... .
I see that python would be installed on PVS storage.
In my past experience, I have compiled Python  from sources on q RHEL workstation, and copied the same installation to multiple machines running the same version of OS.
From the README.md $deploy/sas-bases/examples/sas-pyconfig, I see that the python install confirms to Red Hat Universal Base Image 8 and third party binaries need to compatible with this.
This give me an idea that it should be possible to compile Python from source on an identical machine and copy to the pyconfig-pvs.
Wondering if anybody has tried this? Would appreciate if the community can share thoughts.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi,

It is definitely an interesting idea but to me it seems risky. In short, you would be assuming the compilation of dependencies. Not only that, every time your SAS images will get updates (more or less frequent depending on your chosen cadence), you would need to repeat this process and basically pray the OS on the images won’t change either.

This is the risk of workarounds when talking about immutable images under CI/CD: you would assume any risk and risk mitigation is up to you too, not SAS anymore.

This being said, if you have a test environment, go ahead and give it a shot and let us know 😉

[SASKiwi]

Any major deviation from the recommended installation procedures may invalidate SAS's support policies. While this is probably fine for test systems, you might want to run this past your management before proceeding with production systems.

[Sajid01 · Accepted solution]

Hello @thesasuser 
I have similar experiences on Linux and this would be an interesting approach.
There is an interesting Analogy available.
When one tries to use SAS Access interface to Oracle in SAS Viya 4, the Oracle odbc client used is a pre-compiled binary (https://video.sas.com/detail/video/6234732546001/sas-demo-%7C-how-to-configure-a-sas-access-interfac... ). This indicates that one should be able to follow your approach.
Some work around would be needed for the paths.

As others have rightly pointed out, you will be on your own.
There are  downside however.  Unlike Linux,  SAS in general and Viya in particular, is not something one can download and experiment with. Further It would require convincing the leadership in corporate / enterprise environment to allow this experiment.