Louis Aslett makes data science on the cloud a 2 click step away

I was having a few issues with trying to configure the latest version of RStudio Server and the free help was not helpful enough. I came to this wonderful site and it made my job on running R on the cloud for students just a 2 click step. The best thing is lots of goodies come pre-installed.

http://www.louisaslett.com/RStudio_AMI/

Why an RStudio AMI?

The RStudio team have done a phenomenal job with making it simplicity itself to install, but there are still several motivating factors which led to me creating this AMI:

  • Although simple, it still takes several minutes to install R and RStudio after the virtual machine is going and this adds up if you do it often.
  • More time consuming is getting all the extras one may want such as LaTeX, Git, etc installed.
  • Of course, ‘simple’ is subjective and there are those who don’t know Linux, but want to use RStudio on a server without ever touching a Linux command line.
  • The EBS-backed AMIs with operating systems on tend to have vast swathes of free space which (as a postdoc of modest means) I don’t like paying to store when putting a machine into a stopped state for hibernation between computational runs! Growing an EBS volume is easier than shrinking one, so having a minimally sized AMI ready-to-go saves effort.
  • Having the full tool stack through to linking a Dropbox account in about 5 seconds means that I can go from zero to having a 36-core machine with over 200GB of RAM with all my code and data synced to a fully functional R environment with all supporting tools in a matter of minutes.
  • At the time of writing I couldn’t find any with the standard Amazon search tools and — in the great open-source tradition — that seems like an itch I should scratch!

Screenshot from 2015-09-08 13:12:48

 

Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

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