Running SAS Analytics in a Docker container
Imagine having everything that you need to run SAS -- operating system, software, code, and services -- in a neat easy-to-deploy package that you can run whenever and wherever it makes sense. That's the promise of container technology, the hottest trend in IT management and DevOps. It's an important architecture tool for managing enterprise software on-premise or in the cloud.
Today, you can use SAS Analytics for Containers (supporting SAS 9.4) to easily provision a SAS analytics environment in a Docker container. This allows you to use any of the popular cloud providers (Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and more). SAS is currently developing "official" SAS Viya based containers to add to the portfolio -- but there are several SAS customers who are already using "home built" containers with different SAS offerings.
In this video, Donna DeCapite @dodeca describes how SAS works in a container, and demonstrates different versions of SAS working with three different cloud providers. Donna also introduces the concept of container orchestrators (such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm), which allow for the efficient and automated management of containerized applications in your enterprise.
For end users, the experience of using SAS from a container is seamless. For browser-based software like SAS Studio or Jupyter notebook, you just point to the SAS server address and go.
For all of the details about how this works with each cloud provider, check out Donna's paper from SAS Global Forum 2018: Docker Toolkit for Data Scientists – How to Start Doing Data Science in Minutes!
