Amazon Web Services (AWS), this week added another book to its library of Quick Start deployment tools: SAS Grid computing environments.
Quick Starts make it easy to deploy specific workloads to AWS CloudFormation templates. Quick Start packages simplify complex deployment steps into a few clicks, resulting in a fully functional environment that is ready in less than an hour.
AWS offers many Quick Start packages that cover multiple categories such as security, DevOps, and Big Data/analytics. The latest addition, which was announced Thursday, falls under that category.
SAS Grid is the name for a computing environment created by the SAS Institute and designed for machine learning and data analytics. It is designed to facilitate high-availability and scalability, workload management, and efficient processing.
SAS explains in its documentation that a SAS grid computing environment is one where SAS computing tasks are distributed across multiple computers on a network. All of this is under the control SAS Grid Manager. This environment allows workloads to be distributed across a grid cluster.
Administrators can quickly set up SAS workloads in AWS with the SAS Grid Quick Start. AWS announced that the Quick Start bootstraps infrastructure for a SAS Grid cluster. It provisioned Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances (Amazon EC2) for SAS Grid, SAS Metadata Server and SAS mid-tier components. It also creates Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre, which provides an integrated directory for the grid.
Users must subscribe to the Intel Cloud Edition Lustre AMI via AWS Marketplace in order to deploy SAS Grid on AWS. The SAS Grid Quick Start can then be launched on either a new or an existing virtual private cloud.
AWS stated that after you have deployed Quick Start, you can get a SAS license to install SAS Grid directly into your environment.
You can find more information about the SAS Grid Quick Start here. A deployment guide can also be downloaded here.
