After you upgrade SAS Viya to stable 2025.06 or later, you might be unable to open existing projects in SAS Model Manager. When you try to open a project, the following error is displayed:
This issue occurs even though the project worked correctly before the upgrade.
Starting with the 2025.06 release, the sas-model-management and sas-model-repository services were merged into a new service (sas-model-manager).
Due to this architectural change, SAS Viya now requires a new SAS Model Manager Combo license when you upgrade from earlier releases. If the updated license is not applied during or after the upgrade, users are unable to access SAS Model Manager projects, which results in a licensing error.
For more information, see the following resources:
- Pod Changes
- Pod Changes by Release
- How to Apply a New License
- SAS® Model Manager: 2025.06 (June 2025) Documentation
Workaround
To circumvent this issue, obtain and apply a new SAS Model Manager Combo license for the SAS Viya deployment. See How to Apply a New License for instructions.
After you apply the updated license, verify that you can successfully open the SAS Model Manager projects.
Additional Information
Model Publish Service Deployment Configuration Changes
Starting with the 2025.06 release, the Model Publish service deprecated the use of Kaniko and replaced it with BuildKit. BuildKit is now the default instead of Kaniko to publish models or decisions to container destinations. You must configure BuildKit for the Decisions Runtime Builder service for use with the Model Publish service. See Model Publish Service Deployment Configuration for additional information.
You can still deploy Kaniko, but using it now requires that you turn on the SAS Container Runtime Kaniko feature flag as a post-deployment step.
Note: The option to configure Kaniko for use with publishing objects to container destinations will be removed in the 2025.09 release.
For more information, see SAS Decisions Runtime Builder and Configure Container Publishing Destinations.