When most of us think about ‘IT support’ or ‘IT admin’, we think about the person who answers the phone when our work computer goes wrong. Indeed, the phrase that most of us are most likely to associate with IT support is “Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?”
This view, however, seriously underestimates the importance of IT support teams. Far from simple troubleshooters, they are architects, managers and coordinators, responsible for decisions about how to keep vital applications running. They have to decide when and how to upgrade IT systems to ensure that organisations can run smoothly and efficiently—and all without disrupting the day-to-day operations. This is crucial in any business, but perhaps even more so in banking and financial services, where customers require both good security and instant access to their accounts.
A complex environment
Raiffeisen Banking Group is Austria’s largest banking group, with around half of all Austrians as its customers. Bernhard Lainer is SAS Application Manager at Raiffeisen Informatik, and leads a small team supporting SAS users at the Raiffeisen banks and UNIQA Insurance. His team is in turn supported by a team of SAS consultants on a contract basis which help managing standard administrative tasks. The banking group uses a wide range of SAS products, including Credit Risk, Market Risk and Risk Management for Banking, on both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya environments.
As the SAS Application Manager, Bernhard has to support several hundred SAS users across the many subsidiaries of the Raiffeisen banking group in Austria, such as the Raiffeisen Banken Niederösterreich-Wien, Burgenland, Vorarlberg and the UNIQA Insurance. He notes that the IT landscape is quite complex, even when you only take account of the SAS elements.
“We still have various SAS 9.4 environments on AIX, zOS and Linux. We also have a SAS Viya 3.5 cluster, but this is being replaced by SAS Viya 4 on Kubernetes. We are currently in the process of migration, which we’re doing in stages because not all solutions are available on Viya 4. We started with the reporting system, so that we can use the latest versions of Visual Analytics.”
Raiffeisen Informatik has a clear strategy of consolidating their huge SAS infrastructure into SAS Viya on Kubernetes to reduce maintenance efforts and streamline administration tasks. These SAS Viya environments are run on a Red Hat OpenShift platform. Lucas Kranawetter is the Product Owner of the OpenShift platform at Raiffeisen Informatik. He comments,
“Red Hat OpenShift was chosen for SAS Viya 4 because there was already a team that takes care of the OpenShift clusters and keeps them up to date. We were one of the first providers in Austria to introduce OpenShift back in 2016. Productive applications have been running on this Kubernetes stack since 2018. We run OpenShift on an on-premise virtualised infrastructure.”
Lucas adds that the group’s strategy is to be infrastructure-neutral wherever possible, because this gives maximum flexibility both now and in future.
“This helps us to be able to react more quickly to changing market situations and new orders and to have to reserve fewer resources for high availability.”
Managing the SAS Viya environments
IT support teams have to consider how best to manage updates and upgrades. Bernhard is clear about how and why these decisions are taken for SAS products.
“We decided in favour of monthly STABLE releases so that we are always up to date and have all the new features. I think it is generally better to install several smaller updates rather than a single major changeover each year. This spreads the effort evenly over the year and improves security. However, I’ve noticed that unlike SAS 9, we have virtually no vulnerabilities in Viya 4 because the Viya services are updated much more frequently.”
Bernhard notes that one of the key differences between SAS Viya on Kubernetes and the older environments is the level of automation. He comments that there are far more opportunities to automate processes using a much wider range of tools in the newer environment:
“A lot of the support tasks are now automated. For example, authorisations are controlled by the customer in a self-service manner. I don’t have to do anything here, apart from explaining to new users every now and then that they can request this themselves. I still deploy the reports from the Test to the Prod environment manually but I am planning to automate this soon as well.”
Likewise, he was able to automate the software deployment and update process as well by using the SAS Deployment Operator and the sas-orchestration utility, which are optional components for managing the SAS Viya platform. Using these tools reduces the work needed for updating a release significantly. Lucas adds some details about the SAS Viya environments from a Kubernetes perspective:
“The SAS Viya environments currently run on several shared clusters together with other customer applications. However, we maintain exclusive resources for environments to avoid interference and other disruptions. We use ResourceQuotas at namespace level for this. For the future, however, we are considering dedicated clusters for SAS Viya, as we will then be able to better harmonise our operating activities on the platform, such as updates or similar, with the SAS environment.”
It's important to mention that automation also helps improving the way how Bernhard and Lucas can work together:
“Initially, there was a lively exchange and a good introduction to the world of containers given to me by our OpenShift administrators. Now, with a new deployment, the OpenShift administrator only has to update the Deployment Operator, which then executes the remaining tasks for me with extended rights. This is an advantage for me as I don't always have to ask for additional rights and also an advantage for the OpenShift administrators and security who don't have to give me all the rights straight away.”
Without doubt, this is one of the major reasons that make it possible to manage an infrastructure as large and complex as the SAS Viya environments at Raiffeisen Informatik by Bernhard’s small team.
A changing view
Bernhard notes that the high level of automation means that his job is changing from traditional ‘IT support’ to a much more customer-focused role.
“Far more of my job now is about communicating with customers. For example, we upgrade the STABLE release every two to three months, which isn’t a huge job. I then have to look at the new features and communicate these to the customers. I also spend a lot more time on further development and optimisation, working directly with customers.”
For him, the step towards SAS Viya on Kubernetes has come with many improvements that make his everyday working life easier:
“No more Linux updates, no more security vulnerabilities that I have to deal with, no more discussions with Linux admin and security about which extra tools you need, the data is no longer stored on the server but on a database or a NAS share, starting/stopping of services is much faster and so on …”
As he describes it, the move to SAS Viya on Kubernetes has been a journey for him, which is still ongoing:
“I started my journey 2,5 years ago with no prior experience of Kubernetes. Kubernetes requires a different kind of thinking and especially automation becomes a key principle. While the architecture of the SAS platform might have changed, at the core, it‘s still the same SAS. So far, it has been a steep, but rewarding learning curve.”
As a conclusion, the advice he would give other SAS administrators who find themselves at a similar starting point in their journey to SAS Viya is to have faith in their own expertise. Adapting to new tools and capabilities can feel challenging, but we have all done this before, sometimes several times.
Learn more
Bernhard’s recent presentation at the SAS Innovate conference in Las Vegas is available for a more in-depth look at his team’s experience.
