SAS Viya Platform with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Why It Matters

Combining SAS Viya’s containerized AI suite with ROSA’s fully managed Kubernetes lets enterprises accelerate analytics workloads while cutting operational overhead and infrastructure costs.

Key Takeaways

• SAS Viya runs on ROSA OpenShift 4.18‑4.20.
• ROSA HCP reduces control‑plane setup time and cost.
• Machine pools align SAS workloads with dedicated node resources.
• Amazon RDS PostgreSQL provides managed metadata storage.
• ECR and EFS support images and persistent storage on AWS.

Pulse Analysis

Enterprises seeking to modernize analytics are turning to cloud‑native platforms that blend data science power with scalable infrastructure. SAS Viya, a comprehensive AI and analytics suite, was built for Kubernetes from the ground up, but many organizations struggle with the operational complexity of self‑managed clusters. ROSA eliminates that friction by delivering a fully managed OpenShift environment on AWS, complete with automated upgrades, integrated security, and pay‑as‑you‑go pricing. This partnership enables data teams to focus on model development and insight generation rather than cluster administration.

The reference architecture introduces a disciplined workload‑placement model that maps SAS services—CAS, compute, stateless micro‑services, and stateful infrastructure—to dedicated machine pools. By labeling and tainting nodes, each workload receives optimal CPU, memory, and storage configurations, improving performance and predictability. Integration with native AWS services further streamlines operations: Amazon RDS hosts PostgreSQL metadata, ECR serves container images, and EFS provides shared, high‑throughput storage for SASWORK and CAS cache volumes. ROSA’s Hosted Control Plane (HCP) option reduces control‑plane provisioning time and lowers cost by hosting the plane in a Red Hat‑owned AWS account, while still allowing customer‑owned worker nodes for data residency compliance.

From a business perspective, this combined stack accelerates time‑to‑value for analytics initiatives, reduces total cost of ownership, and aligns with DevSecOps best practices. Organizations can spin up a compliant, production‑grade analytics environment in days rather than weeks, leveraging automated CI/CD pipelines and built‑in security policies. As SAS continues to align its support cadence with OpenShift releases, customers can expect rapid access to new Kubernetes features, ensuring their AI workloads remain future‑proof. Companies ready to modernize should explore the free ROSA hands‑on experience and review the GitHub repository for deployment scripts to fast‑track their migration.