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SAS Grid Gets Its Own Quick Start on AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week added another tome to its library of Quick Start deployment services: SAS Grid computing environments.
Quick Starts simplify the process of deploying specific workloads to the AWS cloud by leveraging AWS CloudFormation templates. Each Quick Start package condenses multi-step deployment procedures down to a few clicks that can result in a fully functional environment being operable in an hour or less.
There are many Quick Start packages available from AWS spanning multiple categories, including DevOps, security and Big Data/analytics. The latest addition, announced Thursday, falls into that last category.
SAS Grid is the name of a computing environment developed by the SAS Institute that's designed for data analytics and machine learning. It's meant to enable high-availability, scalability, workload management and efficient processing.
As SAS puts it in its documentation, "A SAS grid computing environment is one in which SAS computing tasks are distributed among multiple computers on a network, all under the control of SAS Grid Manager. In this environment, workloads are distributed across a grid cluster of computers."
The new SAS Grid Quick Start enables administrators to quickly set up SAS workloads in AWS. "This Quick Start bootstraps the infrastructure for a SAS Grid cluster by provisioning Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for SAS Grid, SAS Metadata Server, and SAS mid-tier components," AWS said in its announcement. "It also sets up Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre, which provides a shared directory for the grid."
To deploy SAS Grid on AWS, users must have a subscription to the Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre AMI via the AWS Marketplace. They will then have the option to launch the SAS Grid Quick Start on either a new or existing virtual private cloud.
"After you deploy the Quick Start, you can obtain a SAS license and install SAS Grid directly into your configured environment," AWS said.
More information on the SAS Grid Quick Start is available here, and a deployment guide can be downloaded here.