Azure Quickstart for SAS Viya 3.4

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Are you looking to use the Azure Quickstart for SAS Viya?

This article discusses the Quickstart and shares a newly created video on the SAS Viya Quickstart Template for Azure. We will discuss the Quickstart and some key elements (aspects) that you need to understand to make use of it.

For example, currently the Quickstart supports the following products:

SAS Visual Analytics 8.3.1 on Linux
SAS Visual Statistics 8.3.1 on Linux
SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning 8.3.1 on Linux.

To access the Quickstart there are two key links, the Microsoft page and the GitHub Quickstart page:

The Microsoft page provides an overview of the parameters and using the template from the command line. The GitHub page provides more detailed information on the requirements and details of the template.

Deployment Overview

The Quickstart currently supports the SAS products listed above utilizing a SMP CAS server. An MPP CAS server configuration is not currently supported. The template builds and configures a Web Application Gateway and three servers, as follows:

An Ansible/Bastion host
A Viya services host, and
A CAS server (CAS Controller).

This is illustrated in the figure below.

Figure: Deployment overview

Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.

As illustrated the Ansible/Bastion host is used for all SSH access to the environment and the Application Gateway is used for the visual interfaces access. As part of running the template a SAS Administrator and SAS User are created, you will need to provide the password(s) for these accounts as part of running the template.

Important things to note

First, let's discuss some key dependencies for running the Quickstart:

Probably the most important thing to understand is that you need a valid software order, the quickstart assumes an order with a supported number of cores. By default, 4, 8 or 16 cores.
The software order can only be for a subset of Viya software, as discussed above.
You can only have one Quickstart deployment per resource group. It is NOT possible to use the same resource group for multiple deployments.
It is possible to modify the default deployment, but you will have to modify the Quickstart using the code provided on GitHub.

In addition to the above, the following prerequisites are required to run the Quickstart:

An Azure user account with Contributor and Administrator roles.
Access to Azure Blob storage (an Azure storage account).
An SSH key pair.
An awareness of your own IP address. This is required to setup the ingress rules, the Network Security Groups.

Finally, it is worth stating that running the Azure Quickstart will incur costs. In addition to licensing SAS software, the Azure resources will be charged to the Azure subscription account you use.

You can estimate the running costs using the Microsoft Azure Pricing calculator, see here. When you open the template, you will see that the default server (VM) instance types are:

Ansible VM: Standard_B2s
Services VM: Standard_E8s_v3
Controller VM: Standard_E8s_v3

Note, the instance types are always being updated, these are the defaults at the time of publishing this blog.

The Video

The video can be found on YouTube within the SAS Technical Insights & Expertise Series playlist.

SAS Viya Quickstart Template for Azure | Introduction and Demonstration

As discussed in the video, to run the Quickstart you should be familiar with Azure and the Quickstart documentation. The video takes you through the steps required to run the template and to quickly validate the resulting deployment.

I hope this is helpful.