Viya

Viya is a cloud-enabled analytics platform developed by SAS Institute for scalable, enterprise-grade analytics. It combines data management, advanced analytics, machine learning, and data visualization within a single, unified environment. At its core is the CAS (Cloud Analytic Services) in-memory engine, which distributes computation across multiple nodes to support large datasets and real-time results. Access is provided through web interfaces, REST APIs, and language bindings for SAS, Python, and R, enabling both traditional SAS programmers and data scientists to work within a common platform.

Architecture and deployment: Viya is designed as a microservices-based, cloud-native platform. It can be deployed on public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as on private data centers. It supports containerization with Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes, enabling scalable deployment and automated model lifecycle management.

Capabilities: Viya covers data ingestion, data preparation, analytics, machine learning, model deployment, and governance. It includes tools for data visualization, experimentation, automated machine learning (AutoML) features, and model management, monitoring, and reproducibility through project-based workspaces and versioning. It emphasizes governance, security, and auditability across enterprise data.

History and impact: Introduced in the mid-2010s as SAS's answer to cloud-native analytics, Viya sought to unify analytics that previously ran on disparate SAS 9 infrastructure. It has been adopted by large organizations across industries for digitization initiatives, data science, and AI workloads, particularly where scalability and cloud deployment are important.