Yes MAS

[#1]

If you're a boxing fan of a certain age, then you remember Roberto Duran ending his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard by saying, "No Más."  Duran was, of course, saying "No More" to Sugar Ray but SAS is saying "Yes" to the MAS (SAS Micro-Analytic Service). Multiple SAS products and solutions, including SAS ESP and SAS Decision Manager, are betting on the MAS.

So what is the MAS?

The MAS is a real time, memory resident, high performance, high bandwidth program execution service. It can execute SAS DS2 packages, Python scripts, as well as C in the upcoming 2.3 release. The MAS is meant to be a lightweight common solution for integrating real-time analytic models (e.g. EMiner score code) with SAS solutions as well as 3rd party applications.

So if it's a "program execution service," does that mean I submit my code to it like SAS Display Manager or Enterprise Guide? Well yeah but the MAS doesn't execute batch code. It executes services, as in RESTful webservices. As such, the MAS is actually a web application and is deployed to the SAS Web application server. Further, it doesn't have a UI like SAS DM or EG either. Well it does have one screen but it doesn't do much...

If there is no UI, how do I interact with the MAS?

You interact with the MAS via a REST API. For example, you can list of the MAS modules (~the DS2 and Python programs deployed to the MAS) with the following GET command, which can be issued in any common web browswer:

http://localhost/SASMicroAnalyticService/rest/modules?

Below, we can see this command running in Chrome.

And to see an example of executing a Decision Builder service via the MAS, see my last post here.

 

How do I get programs into the MAS?

While the doc does explain the requirements for DS2 code being deployed to the MAS along with some basic information on posting DS2 code to a module and/or creating a new MAS module, you'll generally rely on the SAS application (e.g. Decision Builder or ESP) to push the code and create the MAS module for you. If you did really want to create a new MAS module manually, you POST the code to .../rest/modules/createModule url as shown below:

{"method":"POST","rel":"createModule","href":"http://localhost/SASMicroAnalyticService/rest/modules","uri":"/modules"}]}

What Else?

1. ESP 4.2 actually integrated the MAS right into the ESP server. So in that configuration, there is no web application. The MAS is just another software directory within ESP. 
2. SAS can provide a simple web application available for testing MAS modules (programs deployed to the MAS) called MASTest. It looks like this:
   
   
   
   
3. To learn more, see the doc

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[alancox]

Hi Stephen, is there an updated version of the MASTest tool which works with the lastest version of MAS (5.1)? Looks to be just what I'm after for testing & demonstrating the functionality.

thanks

Alan

[StephenFoerster]

Hi Alan,
The Decision Manager team no longer maintains MASTest but if you upgrade to the latest Viya release, Decision Manager 5.2 includes a "Validation Test" feature that shows you how to run the services in the various publishing destinations. So it shows you how the input message needs to be formatted, what endpoint you need to post the message to, etc.
Steve

[alancox]

Thanks Steve, I shall take a look at that. Alan