By gluc
While most web-developers have worked with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or similar platforms before, this is still not the case for many R number crunchers. Especially researchers at academic institutions have less exposure to these commercial offerings. Time to change that!
In this post, we explain how to set up an Ubuntu server instance on AWS, and how to install R on it. In later posts, we will explain how to add RStudio server and Shiny Server Open Source.
Our main goal is to get you started quickly, so we ignore many of the useful options offered by AWS, such as e.g. security aspects.
Alternatives
You might as well chose another platform, and we do not claim that AWS is the best or the cheapest. So do let us know if you think there are reasons why some other cloud service is better suited for R developers.
For a start, depending on your use case, any of the following alternatives might be useful:
- Another cloud service (Azure, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, ElasticHost, etc.)
- Docker (container on any machine, including an AWS instance, or on your development machine, be it Linux or Windows)
Step by step guide to create your AWS instance
Prerequisite: AWS account
If you do not have an AWS account yet, it’s time you get one here. You’ll get a free micro instance for a year or so. This means that you can run this tutorial at no cost. If you already have an AWS account, you’re ready for the next step: Creating an AWS instance.
1. Create AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance
Within the AWS management console, go to EC2 and create a new Ubuntu instance:
Click Select on the latest Ubuntu Server, and then click Review and Launch. Ignore the warnings about the security groups, we’ll worry about that later.
Next, the wizard will ask you about the key pair. The …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com
