Questions about the SAS Viya4-Deployment GitHub project

[EyalGonen]

Hi experts,

If I want to deploy Viya 4 by using the https://github.com/sassoftware/viya4-deployment project and I have not used any of the SAS IaC projects such as https://github.com/sassoftware/viya4-iac-aws to setup the K8S cluster.

Questions:

1. The Viya4-Deployment can "Retrieve cloud configuration from tfstate (if using a SAS Viya 4 IaC project)" but in my case I have not used the IaC project so it is unclear to me what do I need to do in the "Viya4-Deployment" project instead of pointing it to the IaC Terraform state ?

2. Does Viya4-Deployment support on-premise installation such as on VMWare Tanzu or Upstream K8S?

3. I could not find a discussion board for the "Viya4-Deployment" github project as exists for other projects on github. Is this the correct place to post questions on this project?

Thanks!

[thomas_pangborn]

Hi @EyalGonen ,

Answer below and extra info:

1. The Viya4-Deployment can "Retrieve cloud configuration from tfstate (if using a SAS Viya 4 IaC project)" but in my case I have not used the IaC project so it is unclear to me what do I need to do in the "Viya4-Deployment" project instead of pointing it to the IaC Terraform state ?

You will not be able to leverage the iac samples you'll need to provide all provisioned information via this sample file. 

2. Does Viya4-Deployment support on-premise installation such as on VMWare Tanzu or Upstream K8S?

Yes, as long as the infrastructure you've setup supports SAS Viya. You can verify this using this tool. This holds true for ANY infrastructure you setup not using the IAC tool base. For an example of how to setup a system using bare metal or VMWare and Upstream K8s check out this repo.

3. I could not find a discussion board for the "Viya4-Deployment" github project as exists for other projects on github. Is this the correct place to post questions on this project?

Not quite sure what other projects provide in terms of discussion boards, for the IAC/DAC projects you can open an issue and start a conversation there from within GitHub.

Let us know if you need any more info.

Take care,

Thomas

[EyalGonen]

Hi @thomas_pangborn 

Does VMWare Tanzu (on virtual machines) qualify as Open Source Kubernetes as far as SAS is concerned in terms of SAS Viya deployment instructions?

If so, do you recommend to setup the cluster using https://github.com/sassoftware/viya4-iac-k8s/ ?

Eyal

[thomas_pangborn]

For the viya-iac-k8s repo you can use bare-metal or VMware. Tanzu is not supported. As for virtual machines, the customer must have the correct number of machines to support their installation of SAS. We provide some example files in the repo to illustrate this.

As for recommendations, if they are looking for a cluster that would run SAS Viya on a cluster that has been designed for this I would suggest they use the viya4-iac-k8s repo. It does simplify things.

Just note that using the code base does require between 10-15 if not more virtual machines to support that SAS software. This can be scaled down, but again, since on-prem or virtual machines are not dynamically scalable the infra must be there from the beginning.

Hope this helps.