A recipe for success in migrating to SAS Viya consists of a few essential ingredients. Understanding why you’re doing it, what outcomes you’re expecting and how you get there with various migration strategy options to ensure the ease of transition and adoption with minimal disruption to business continuity.
Having a clear understanding of why you’re doing it is important, it helps identify business drivers and benefits which support the cause as to why you even bother. Are you looking to increase performance, leverage new analytical techniques, encourage collaboration between teams or deploy applications in a native cloud? If so, would they translate to moving faster and enhancing customer experience? bringing products and services to the market quicker? or reducing operational costs?
So, how should you move forward? The first step, strangely enough, is not about starting a migration project, but how you can start making use of SAS Viya immediately. Interoperability strategy ensures you can leverage SAS Viya from the word “Go”. Having SAS Viya sit alongside your existing SAS 9, you can continue to use some of your familiar SAS 9 interfaces such as SAS Studio, Enterprise Guide, Enterprise Miner and Display Manager System (DMS) to pass through code to execute on either SAS Viya Compute server (with little or no change to your code) or the Cloud Analytics Services (CAS) engine (with little code change or some refactoring, eg. loading data into memory tables, change to CAS-enabled PROCedures). This strategy is also good to ensure some really old legacy applications continue to function unaffected as they continue to run on SAS 9. eg. SAS/AF, SAS/FSP, etc. Existing SAS code libraries and data libraries can be shared and leveraged between SAS 9 and SAS Viya. For some organisations, this is all you need to do.
Migrating from SAS 9 to SAS Viya is an incremental process. Success is typically achieved by prioritising and staging your migration over time rather than attempting a single all-encompassing event. The next step in the process is when you’re ready to progress toward making SAS Viya your core operational environment. This is when a migration project starts where you can look to increase workloads in SAS Viya and decrease reliance on SAS 9. Content Promotion strategy is the start of this journey, and the “Discovery and Planning” phase is the most crucial step of the project. You first need to know what content you have built up over the years such as code, reports, jobs, data, cubes, etc. In order to do that, SAS provides tools to ease this migration and can work alongside you to assess your existing code and/or inventory your application content.
Knowing exact what existing content that you have and how you currently use the applications (eg. you write programs, or you produce various outputs using point-and-click interfaces and SAS metadata), it will help formulate how you can migrate. It is important to understand that the migration is an opportunity to leverage the native advanced SAS Viya technology which is backed by modern architecture (eg. microservices, cloud deployment) and processes such as CI/CD which are very different to the monolithic SAS 9 architecture. While it is possible to lift-and-shift and start realising the benefits immediately, the true value comes from leveraging more of the in-memory CAS engine in SAS Viya. To this end, it means migration strategy should include considerations such as revising, refactoring, rebuilding and replacing.
Lastly, a migration involves more than just moving applications to SAS Viya, it is a process that consists of planning, preparing, executing, validating and rollout, it involves different people at various stages. To ensure a successful migration, right level of training is also needed to establish user acceptance and ongoing adoption of SAS Viya.
I have compiled a list of resources to help you with your migration plans:
@Mark_sas wrote a paper for SAS Global Forum 2020 on the migration.
He also prepared a video presentation of the material:
WEBINAR by Steven Sober and Brian Kinnebrew: Best Practices for Migrating SAS Code to Leverage CAS
Brian Kinnebrew also has a tutorial on Migrating SAS 9 Jobs to SAS Viya.
And I have attached a PDF of an in-depth presentation on the subject.
I hope this material will be useful in your migration.
