SAS® Cloud—an interview with the women involved

Recently, you may have heard about the release of the new SAS Cloud. The platform allows fast access to data-science applications in the cloud! Running on the SAS Cloud and using the latest container technology, SAS Cloud eliminates the need to install, update, or maintain software or related infrastructure.

SAS Machine Learning on SAS Cloud is designed for SAS and open source data scientists to gain on-demand programmatic access to SAS Viya. All the algorithms provided by SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning (VDMML), SAS Visual Statistics and SAS Visual Analytics are available through the offering. Developers and data scientists access SAS through a programming interface using either the SAS or Python programming languages.

A free trial for SAS Cloud is available, and registration is simple. The trial environment allows users to manage and collaborate with others, share data, and create runtime models to analyze their data. The system is pre-loaded with sample data for learning and allows users to upload their own data. My colleague Joe Furbee explains how to register for the trial and takes you on a tour of the system in his article, Zero to SAS in 60 Seconds- SAS Machine Learning on SAS Cloud.

Luckily, I had the privilege of being the technical writer for the documentation for SAS Cloud, and through this met two of my now close friends at SAS.

Alyssa Andrews (pictured left) and Mariah Bragg (pictured right) are both Software Developers at SAS but worked on the UI for SAS Cloud. Mariah works in the Research and Development (R&D) division of SAS while Alyssa works in the Information Technology (IT) division. As you can see this project ended up being an interesting mix of SAS teams!

As Mariah told me the history, I learned that SAS Cloud “was a collaborative project between IT and R&D. The IT team presented the container technology idea to Dr. Goodnight but went to R&D because they wanted this idea to run like an R&D project.”

SAS Cloud is now available to the public, so I asked Mariah and Alyssa about their experience working on the UI for SAS Cloud, and about all the work that they had completed to bring this powerful platform to life!

What is SAS Cloud for you? How do you believe it will help SAS users?

Alyssa: For me, it is SAS getting to do Software as a Service. So now you can click on our SAS Software and it can magically run without having to add the complexity of shipping a technical support agent to the customer's site to install a bunch of complex software.

Mariah: I agree. This will be a great opportunity for SAS to unify and have all our SAS products on the cloud.

Alyssa: Now, you can trial and then pay for SAS products on the fly without having to go through any complexities.

What did you do on the project as UI Developers?

Alyssa: I was lent out to the SAS Cloud team from another team and given a tour-of-duty because I had a background in Django (a high-level Python Web design tool) which is another type of API framework you can build a UI on top of. Then I met Mariah, who came from an Angular background, and we decided to build the project on Angular. So, I would say Mariah was the lead developer and I was learning from her. She did more of the connecting to the API backend and building the store part out, and I did more of the tweaks and the overlays.

What is something you are proud of creating for SAS Cloud?

Mariah: I’m really proud to be a part of something that uses Angular. I think I was one of the first people to start using Angular at SAS and I am so excited that we have something out there that is using this new technology. I am also really proud of how our team works together, and I’m really proud of how we architectured the application. We went through multiple redesigns, but they were very manageable, and we really built and designed such that we could pull out components and modify parts without much stress.

Alyssa: That we implemented good design practices. It is a lot more work on the front-end, but it helps so much not to have just snowflake code (a term used by developers to describe code that isn’t reusable or extremely unique to where it becomes a problem later on and adds weight to the program) floating. Each piece of code is there for a reason, it’s very modular.

What are your hopes for the future of SAS Cloud?

Alyssa: I hope that it continues to grow and that we add even more applications to this new container technology so that SAS can move even more into the cloud arena. I hope it brings success. It is a really cool platform, so I can’t wait to hear about users and their success with it.

Mariah: I agree with Alyssa. I also hope it is successful so that we keep moving into the Cloud with SAS.

Learning more

As a Developmental Editor with SAS Press, it was a new and engaging experience to get to work with such an innovative technology like SAS Cloud. I was happy I got to work with such an exciting team and I also look forward to what is next for SAS Cloud.

And as a SAS Press team member, I hope you check out the new way to trial SAS Machine Learning with SAS Cloud. And while you are learning SAS, check out some of our great books that can help you get started with SAS Studio, like Ron Cody’s Biostatistics by Example Using SAS® Studio.

Already experienced but want to know more about how to integrate R and Python into SAS? Check out Kevin D. Smith’s blogs on R and Python with SAS Viya. Also, take a moment to investigate our new books on using open-source R and Python with SAS Viya: SAS Viya: The R Perspective by Yue Qi, Kevin D. Smith, and XingXing Meng and SAS Viya: The Python Perspective by Kevin D. Smith and XingXing Meng.

These great books can set you on the right path to learning SAS before you begin your jump into SAS Cloud, the new way to experience SAS.

SAS® Cloud—an interview with the women involved was published on SAS Users.