Suppose you have a variable like AccountID
split(trim(AccountID),’-‘)[0]
trim- removes spaces
split using – , splits the string into multiple parts based on delimiter –
and [0] gives the first part of the split string ([1] will give the second part, etc .)
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!
I was there on June 10 to attend the hands-on-session cum event for IBM’s PaaS offering IBM Bluemix. The event took place at http://cercles.co.in/ which is a relatively new startup coworking space in Hauz Khas Village Delhi. Since this was just 5 minute walk from where I currently live, I attended along with an intern and a colleague of my new training company http://decisionstats.org The event was nicely organized, the infrastructure was good, the speakers were quite awesome. To read what really happened you can see the summary at the clouddelhi hashtag.
One thing I noticed R is not really given as much attention in Bluemix. I particularly found IBM Watson APIs (which are RESTful) to be a great case for #rstats packages .
Bluemix has a nice interface, and they are offering 30 day free which is quite low compared to 1 yr of AWS. IBM is focussed on hybrid cloud for enterprises and opportunities for people like us depend on becoming ISV (Independent Software Vendors) or Partners in the IBM ecosystem https://twitter.com/hashtag/CloudDelhi?src=hash
Fortunately I didnt have to speak. I liked Cercles well enough to book a seat for my startup for the next month something which I have not done so despite considering two-three other co-working hubs in the past in Delhi-Gurgaon.
An additional thing was Woman in Tech as a theme. I found some of the reactions interesting there. Perhaps Governments need to adopt the Woman in Tech theme, but they seem ignorant and uninformed as corporations try to tweak their policies to gain and retain talent, than advise policy makers to help create a better ecosystem. 
My second book – R for Cloud Computing : An Approach for Data Scientists is now ready for sale ( ebook). Softcover should be available within a month. Some of you have already booked an online review copy. It has taken me 2 years to write this book, and as always I accept all feedback on how to be a better writer.
I would like to especially thank Hannah Bracken of Springer Publishing for this.
and I dedicate this book to my 7 year son Kush.
http://www.springer.com/statistics/computational+statistics/book/978-1-4939-1701-3
“Everything that is good in me, come from your love, Kush“
So I wanted to really find out how cheap the cloud was- but I got confused by the 23 kinds of instances than Amazon has http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ and 15 kinds of instances at https://developers.google.com/compute/pricing.
or whether there is any price collusion between them 😉
Now Amazon has spot pricing so I can bid for prices as well (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/spot-instances/ ) and upto 60% off for reserved instances (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/) but charges $2 for dedicated instances (which are not dedicated but pay as you go)
Google has sustained discounts ( will not offer Windows on the cloud though!)
The table below describes the discount at each usage level. These discounts apply for all instance types.
| Usage Level (% of month) | % at which incremental is charged | Example incremental rate (USD/per hour) for an n1-standard-1 instance |
|---|---|---|
| 0%-25% | 100% of base rate | $0.07 |
| 25%-50% | 80% of base rate | $0.056 |
| 50%-75% | 60% of base rate | $0.042 |
| 75%-100% | 40% of base rate | $0.028 |
Anyways- I tried to create this simple table to help me with it- after all hard disks are cheap- it is memory I want on the cloud !
Or maybe I am wrong and the cloud is not so cheap- or its just too complicated for someone to build a pricing calculator that can take in prices from all providers (Amazon, Azure, Google Compute) and show us the money!
| vCPU | RAM(GiB) | $ per Hour | Type -Linux Usage | Provider | Notes | |
| t2.micro | 1 | 1 | $0.01 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | Amazon also has spot instances |
| t2.small | 1 | 2 | $0.03 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | that can lower prices |
| t2.medium | 2 | 4 | $0.05 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| m3.medium | 1 | 3.75 | $0.07 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| m3.large | 2 | 7.5 | $0.14 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| m3.xlarge | 4 | 15 | $0.28 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| m3.2xlarge | 8 | 30 | $0.56 | General Purpose – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| c3.large | 2 | 3.75 | $0.11 | Compute Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| c3.xlarge | 4 | 7.5 | $0.21 | Compute Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| c3.2xlarge | 8 | 15 | $0.42 | Compute Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| c3.4xlarge | 16 | 30 | $0.84 | Compute Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| c3.8xlarge | 32 | 60 | $1.68 | Compute Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| g2.2xlarge | 8 | 15 | $0.65 | GPU Instances – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| r3.large | 2 | 15 | $0.18 | Memory Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| r3.xlarge | 4 | 30.5 | $0.35 | Memory Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| r3.2xlarge | 8 | 61 | $0.70 | Memory Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| r3.4xlarge | 16 | 122 | $1.40 | Memory Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| r3.8xlarge | 32 | 244 | $2.80 | Memory Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| i2.xlarge | 4 | 30.5 | $0.85 | Storage Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| i2.2xlarge | 8 | 61 | $1.71 | Storage Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| i2.4xlarge | 16 | 122 | $3.41 | Storage Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| i2.8xlarge | 32 | 244 | $6.82 | Storage Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| hs1.8xlarge | 16 | 117 | $4.60 | Storage Optimized – Current Generation | Amazon (North Virginia) | |
| n1-standard-1 | 1 | 3.75 | $0.07 | Standard | Google -US | Google charges per minute |
| n1-standard-2 | 2 | 7.5 | $0.14 | Standard | Google -US | of usage (subject to minimum of 10 minutes) |
| n1-standard-4 | 4 | 15 | $0.28 | Standard | Google -US | |
| n1-standard-8 | 8 | 30 | $0.56 | Standard | Google -US | |
| n1-standard-16 | 16 | 60 | $1.12 | Standard | Google -US | |
| n1-highmem-2 | 2 | 13 | $0.16 | High Memory | Google -US | |
| n1-highmem-4 | 4 | 26 | $0.33 | High Memory | Google -US | |
| n1-highmem-8 | 8 | 52 | $0.66 | High Memory | Google -US | |
| n1-highmem-16 | 16 | 104 | $1.31 | High Memory | Google -US | |
| n1-highcpu-2 | 2 | 1.8 | $0.09 | High CPU | Google -US | |
| n1-highcpu-4 | 4 | 3.6 | $0.18 | High CPU | Google -US | |
| n1-highcpu-8 | 8 | 7.2 | $0.35 | High CPU | Google -US | |
| n1-highcpu-16 | 16 | 14.4 | $0.70 | High CPU | Google -US | |
| f1-micro | 1 | 0.6 | $0.01 | Shared Core | Google -US | |
| g1-small | 1 | 1.7 | $0.04 | Shared Core | Google -US |
A Brief Tutorial I wrote by playing with the software at manage.windowsazure.com
A presentation I made today on a talk
DECISION STATS 