Watch this Ask the Expert session to discover the evolution of SAS Viya, why it’s a revolutionary move to the cloud, and how it differs from traditional SAS systems.
Watch the webinar
Join me as I cover the four key pillars of SAS Viya that enable you to make confident decisions at every moment: reality tested AI, resilience amid uncertainty, fast outcomes and trusted results, and for everyone, everywhere. During this webinar you will learn:
- The massive industry shift underway to move analytic work to the cloud.
- SAS’ major transition in our SAS Viya architecture to ensure our customers can move their analytic work closer to their data.
- Beyond cloud, the many important reasons organizations are adding SAS Viya to their analytic portfolio.
The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.
Q&A
How hard is it to convert my existing SAS code to Viya?
It’s more about being strategic about it. If you use this tool, it will access your code and show you how much of your code is portable to CAS. 95% of it can typically run in the SPREE engine. It can show you tweaks you need to make to take full advantage of things. There is probably a lot of optimization and modernization that can take place with code. Don’t just lift and shift, think of how you can innovate when you move your code.
Which cloud providers are supported?
The latest release of SAS Viya (2020.1+) is supported on Microsoft Azure (AKS), and we are adding support for AWS (EKS), and Google (GKE) this month. Support for Red Hat OpenShift on VMWare is slated for sometime this summer.
What is IDC?
International Data Corporation. https://www.idc.com/
For a SAS Programmer/Developer, what is the best source or reference books to get to learn more about SAS Viya?
You can get started on the SAS Viya page. You can also dig into the SAS Viya documentation resources. If you’re already on SAS Viya, go to your MySAS Portal and you can find a lot of virtual learning information in your portal.
What is the minimum Viya for BASE SAS programs?
BASE SAS programs can run inside SPREE. You should check out the content assessment tool to take a look at what you have and see what’s happening. You will at least need containers and a single CAS server with one worker. Things scale out in those CAS workers. You can do a programming only instance.
Can programs be controlled by our company’s scheduling software?
I’m assuming you are referring to the updates. If the software is plugged into Kubernetes and the cloud systems to update containers, then yes, we are compatible with that.
How does it work with SAS/IntrNet? We currently use it a lot and want to maintain that functionality.
Years ago, I remember migrating my applications to the SAS Stored Process web application because it had more robust functionality and was where development was going. If I remember correctly, I believe they added the ability to call stored processes from the SAS Visual Analytics interface. But then the question becomes, why not use the VA interface to surface results to end users over the web? Well-designed reports may be able to render live, the same results you’re providing currently. Have you done the SAS Viya trial yet? It might be worth a shot to kick the tires to get a sense of what VA can deliver visually.
Where can I learn the SAS Viya basics as a programmer?
You can get started on the SAS Viya page. You can also dig into the SAS Viya documentation resources.
How do we know which parts of SAS 9.4 programs will run in Viya? What is the 5% that don’t work?
The content assessment tool provides guidance on what runs directly and the types of changes you would need to make.
How is the Python programming language incorporated with the cloud SAS Viya technology?
There are numerous ways to use Python with SAS (not just Viya), but the SAS Scripting Wrapper for Analytics Transfer (SWAT) package is the Python client to SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS). SWAT allows users to execute CAS actions and process the results all from Python. You can learn more about it here: https://developer.sas.com/guides/python.html. For more information on open source integration, go to www.sas.com/open.
In my university we are considering using SAS cloud. However, a few of us prefer the desk copy SAS license we have now. What do you think about that?
The desktop copy of any application has traditionally been preferred (think Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc.). However, the world is becoming more and more connected. We’re rarely not connected to the internet anymore. Plus, applications are getting more and more robust using cloud applications, and the backend of these systems are extraordinarily scalable and reliable. For example, you can’t use your laptop to quickly train a computer vision model with millions of images. Instead, people will use GPUs and cloud computing to “borrow” that kind of computing taking the job from 2 days to 20 minutes. Plus, the SAS Cloud will deliver the latest capabilities we develop the moment they’re ready. That’s just not available on a desktop application. So if you want to use the latest stuff, be able to work with larger datasets (or find your laptop is struggling to keep up or taking hours to run jobs), then you should look at cloud-based offerings.
How long does the SAS Viya implementation take?
I just saw a demo of a Viya deployment, and it was about 40 minutes. Implementation however (assessment, people, training, process, procurement, etc.) obviously varies significantly by organization.
Are CAS workers a similar concept to multi-threading?
CAS workers are multi-threaded AND work together to be massively parallel (MPP). Imagine a dataset with a couple billion rows distributed across multiple CAS workers persisting that dataset in memory (or intelligently swapping it so it’s “practically” in memory). Then your run normal analytic routines on the giant dataset and all the CAS workers simultaneously process using all the cores available across the cluster.
Is the implementation similar to LSAF?
I’m not familiar with that acronym. Please leave a comment with more detail and I’ll be happy to respond.
What is the name of the tool that shows you how much coding is different from existing code to CAS?
It’s called the SAS 9 Content Assessment.
In terms of SAS programming and job scheduling, would that be an easy task to do in the SAS Viya cloud?
Yes, SAS Studio is a programming interface included in all SAS Viya offerings (among other WYSIWYG GUIs).
When will SAS Training be more accessible to my user base along with my license? We have LinkedIn Learning and Pluralsight but none of the new SAS Software is available on those platforms.
We offer a lot of different learning formats (https://www.sas.com/en_us/training/courses/learning-formats.html ) however I’m not familiar with the channels our education division is using to deliver training. I’d reach out to them to learn more about that. There is a contact us link at the bottom of the page listed above.
Recommended Resources
SAS Viya Web Page
SAS | Microsoft Web Page
Travel to Faster, Trusted Decisions in the Cloud Webinar Series
Content Assessment Tool
Pondering AI Podcast
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