Using SAS to Download Files From Amazon Web Services S3

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Presenter: Michael Raithel

The popularity of cloud computing is resulting in more organizations storing data in clouds and processing it off premises. It’s a matter of time before many SAS programmers will be tasked with accessing client data stored in cloud structures. A Westat project was tasked with downloading objects stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Services (S3) buckets. The assignment was for a list of objects to be downloaded from an S3 bucket every week. This presentation will start with an overview of cloud computing services and the top cloud providers. Next, we will discuss AWS S3 and how SAS PROC S3 can be used to process objects in S3. You will learn about a SAS macro program that was written to access a given S3 bucket and download a set of objects whose names were specified in a flat file. The macro program is general enough that it can be used as-is to download files. The program can also be used as a jumping-off point for writing programs that perform other functions on objects stored in S3 buckets.