R on Amazon's Cloud

Summary:

How to, best practices, benchmarks, discussion

R on Amazon's Cloud

dmurphy 09 Mar 2014 04:13

It is possible to run RStudio in Amazon's cloud (EC2), upload data and run some analysis. I wanted to upload a pdf with step-by-step instructions via screen shots, but this forum doesn't seem to allow me to do that. (If it does and you want to see it, let me know how. Thanks.) The "session" appeared to cost $0, and nothing required me to have Administrator rights.

Dan Murphy

Re: R on Amazon's Cloud

bescoto 09 Mar 2014 21:31

Dan send me his PDF, here's a link to it:

http://opensourcesoftware.casact.org/local--files/start/AWS%20Demo.pdf

Thanks Dan for this great work and documentation. We'll see if we can continue from there this year and get something "production ready".

Last edited on 09 Mar 2014 21:32 by bescoto Show more

Re: R on Amazon's Cloud

dmurphy 09 Mar 2014 22:35

np. And thanks for helping me get automatically notified of new posts to forums I'm tracking. Worked great!

Re: R on Amazon's Cloud

bescoto 01 Sep 2014 01:33

I just created a running instance and installed some actuarial packages on it, like actuar, ChainLadder, and Brian's MRMR package. Currently it's running in a free (micro) instance, which only has 1GB of RAM. This wasn't enough to compile some of R's packages (such as dplyr) at reasonable speeds, so if we find this idea useful we should probably get some money for an upgrade. Still though, it's useful enough for some demos. Click here to use the instance (username "rstudio", password "cas open source" without the spaces), and see cloud for some more information about the instance.

Any comments? Feel free to use the log on the cloud page to make your own image and upgrade it. I can also give you root access to that image, but I wasn't sure about the security ramifications of posting my secret key publicly.

Re: R on Amazon's Cloud

dmurphy 25 Sep 2014 20:48

Ben, I clicked on the 'here' link and was curious if any changes I made would be saved when I signed out. So I closed the "Welcome.R" script and when I signed back in it was still closed.

So, be forewarned everybody! Any changes you make will be saved for everyone else to see.

Thought I'd have a little fun with that. The Birthday Problem!

I started a Visitors.R script that creates a matrix called Birthdays: names in the first column, birthdays — month and day — in column 2. I put myself in twice so you can see how some R users punctuate when a variable number of multiple rows is possible. Starting a row with a comma looks weird but works great.

Add your name then source the whole script to see how many visitors it will take until we find a duplicate. Don't forget to hit save.

Re: R on Amazon's Cloud

Hai You 26 Sep 2014 17:27

I played some testing there also, Ben/Dan. It is a good cloud place where we can share and play some small R code.

Re: R on Amazon's Cloud

(account deleted) 02 Dec 2014 21:36

Just saw this on the SAS and R blog. It describes how to get going with Docker and RStudio server. Looks pretty easy and cheap. I think most companies could swing $5 per month to experiment with R. I'll have a go at it and see how well it works.