Updated information about running SAS in the Public Cloud

[MargaretC]

Greetings everyone,

I just wanted to share with you the link to my updated “Important Performance Considerations When Moving SAS to a Public Cloud” from SAS Global Forum 2019. 

https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2019/3363-2019.pdf

As I mention in the paper, things are always changing in the public cloud.  Here are two new items to share with you since my paper was published:

1. New AWS E32 instance: i3en  Here is information from my colleague at AWS about how this new instance type can be used by SAS: 

The i3en instance family is designed for data-intensive workloads where the data resides on the NVMe volumes attached to the instance. They come with more than 2x the NVMe instance store volume capacity and 4x the network performance. They also come with the new Elastic Fabric Adapters (EFA) to provide even lower latencies and  consistent network performance (SAS has not tested these adapters yet). Because they’re designed to leverage local store volumes for high performance block storage, high performance EBS access wasn’t a priority.

You can utilize the entire available network bandwidth of the instance to FSx for Lustre. These instances will be able to burst up to 25 Gbps for short periods of time but then fall back to the baseline throughput of each instance type (which is not published).

1. DDN’s Lustre is available in MS Azure.  Instructions on how to create a Lustre cluster on Azure can be found here:

https://wiki.whamcloud.com/display/PUB/Creating+a+Lustre+Cluster+on+Azure

Enjoy this information.

Cheers,

Margaret

[MargaretC]

Please use this link to get information on Lustre in MS Azure.  

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/ddn-whamcloud-5345716.lustre_on_azure?...   

Cheers,

Margaret

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @MargaretC ,

do you know if it is possible in SAS 9 to read/write data to Azure storage services, such as Blob storage or Data Lake Storage Gen2, and how?

The only thing I managed to find is that, though interfaces/adapters, it should be possible to use Blob, but with all kind of limitations to the point that it seems unusable for SAS platform. 

The other option i found would be to make use of the REST APIs which I suspect it would require the usage of proc http, proc soap and perhaps proc json.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Juan