Elevated efficiency and reduced cost: SAS in the era of Cloud Adoption
Adoption of cloud computing in recent years has dramatically changed the way organisations handle data and analytics these days. Explosive growth of generative AI based applications and services is expected to drive the use of public cloud infrastructure even further. With such a decisive shift towards a more dynamic and scalable IT environment, organisations who designed their critical business applications based on traditional SAS deployment (aka SAS9 customers) are looking for ways to leverage exciting opportunities offered by the cloud while causing minimum disruption to their well-established workloads.
SAS too has swiftly evolved in recent years to align itself with this exciting new paradigm with the introduction of SAS Viya. This is an open and highly performant AI, Analytics & Data Management Platform that runs as a containerised application in a Kubernetes cluster in both public and private cloud environments. At the same time, the industry has witnessed rise of new data lake platforms from vendors like Databricks, Snowflake, Starburst and more.
With a steady growth in expenditure on cloud infrastructure and services every year, senior executives are increasingly looking for ways to get more for their money as they modernise their analytics workloads. Not surprisingly, managing cloud expenses has emerged as a more pressing challenge than security for the second year in a row, according to a recent State of the Cloud report.
Figure 1: Survey results for challenges faced in migrating workloads to public cloud (Source: Flexera 2024 State of the cloud report)
These cost considerations are not just limited to storage and compute costs but also include evaluation of multi-cloud strategy and other factors such as
- cost of migration (re-coding and re-testing established complex applications in a new language)
- cost of training business experts to become expert programmers (a blended approach of low-code/no-code and pro-code)
- efficiency gains from a unified platform that brings different together different personas to work with consistent data
Cost savings with improved performance
When it comes to the infrastructure cost, findings in this performance benchmark report published by an independent consultancy concluded that SAS Viya is one of the most cost-performant and cost-conscious analytics platform available to enterprise cloud users. The cloud-native architecture of SAS Viya means that cost savings can also be achieved with features like in-database processing and workload management. This gives the ability to minimise data movement and optimise the cloud resources to remain active or scale up during high workload periods and to shut down or scale down during periods of reduced activity.
Mitigating cost of migration
Migrating a well-established application developed in SAS9 may have been an intimidating thought but SAS has a proven track record of exceptional customer support and this proud legacy continues to be at the core of our discussions, when we plan a move to SAS Viya with our SAS9 customers. You can get a good sense of the complexity and effort involved for a planned migration by using SAS Content Assessment tool. Moreover, this case study brings a customer experience of migrating from SAS9 to life and this blog demonstrates how you can reuse majority of your SAS9 code in SAS Viya, based on our analysis of over 3 Billion lines of code (as of May 2023).
Efficiency gains
While cost represents one critical consideration in the migration planning, it is worth keeping a close eye on the efficiency gains that the modern platform has to offer. In this context, the ability of SAS Viya to support programming experts (SAS as well as open source) and non-programmers from the same platform means that different personas can collaborate effectively. The “beautifully designed interfaces across the entire data-to-decision lifecycle” (quoted from the Forrester’s AI Decisioning report) of SAS Viya enable business users and non-programmers to generate valuable insights from data with a self-service approach. A blended use of SAS Studio Steps, SAS code, Python code and Custom Steps in the same Studio Flow, as shown below, is a great example of how significant efficiency gains can be realised by bringing users with diverse skills together.
Figure 2: A view of SAS Studio user interface in SAS Viya (Source: SAS)
Conclusion
The transition to this new world, with cloud taking the centre stage, presents both opportunities and challenges for organisations and it is critical that they must evaluate the technology options carefully. In this context, it is crucial that the SAS9 customers make sure their view is not blurred by well-established concepts presented with new terminology or by vendors comparing the latest, designed-for-cloud technology with the traditional SAS9 capabilities. Organisations will only fully understand their options, costs and potential benefits when comparing new vendors’ offerings with SAS Viya Technology.
Other blogs in the series:
Harness the analytical power of your Databricks platform with SAS - SAS Support Communities
Data everywhere and anyhow! Gain insights from across the clouds with SAS
