Back to the Future with SAS Viya Releases?

[SASKiwi]

Recent SAS news indicates that the latest version of Viya is no longer Viya 4 but Viya 2020.1! Is this a case of "Back to the Future"? SAS users long in the tooth will remember that SAS releases prior to Version 5 were done by year, like 79.6 and 82.4. These are the releases I started out on back in the day.

I'd be interested in knowing the background to this release name change. Are De Lorean cars and rocket-powered skateboards included?!  

[ballardw]

Please don't tell me this is a harbinger of Disco returning.😟

I started with SAS 5, so missed the year names. Maybe using 2020.1 to avoid issues when 2079 comes around and confusion with the previous version 79? Y2K bug prevention?

[ChrisHemedinger · Accepted solution]

Hi All, thanks for this discussion and question.  I have a few insights to add.

First, "SAS Viya 4" was never really an official name, but we used that term to differentiate SAS Viya "generations".  SAS Viya 3.x is cloud-friendly but often installed on-prem, whereas "SAS Viya 4" represents an architecture rebuilt to be cloud-native, easy to deploy on all providers (Azure is first), and designed to use the native cloud services in the various providers.  

The new SAS Viya is continuously delivered -- with updates coming every month.  It's standard practice in the SaaS / CD realm to number releases with the Year.# (ex: 2020.1) so you can quickly determine which version has the capability you need or are currently using. So in January, you'll see 2021.# versions coming out.  (But before that, you'll see another 2020.# version coming in late December.)

There's more to this scheme, as the new SAS Viya has the concept of these regular monthly releases and then long-term support (LTS) releases that customers can adopt and stick with for a while, if it suits them.

SAS Tech Support policies provide a view into this cadence of continuously delivered releases -- see the section on SAS Viya 2020.1 and Later.

[joeFurbee]

Hi @SASKiwi,

I'll try and find our official statement, but here's the general thinking and gist:

The new release of SAS Viya offers a cloud-native solution, built on CI/CD principals. It is a natural progression to move to a Calendar Versioning paradigm (a common practice for CI/CD software delivery). The new versioning system allows for rapid release of fixes and updates, while maintaining stable release and LTS version schedules and support.

I'll update with further details as they come out.