Setting up RStudio Server on a Compute Engine instance is mostly straightforward, but I ran into a few quirks along the way, so hopefully this brief guide will save some people the same head-scratching.
What came as a wonderful surprise was that there’s a server edition offering a polished, browser-based interface almost identical to the desktop version (for free!) Considering that even big companies’ attempts to bring desktop software to the cloud still deliver either limited functionality “lite” versions or lazy streaming clients (I’m looking at you, Adobe), RStudio really can’t get enough credit for this. I do most of my work in R, so I already knew that RStudio was a near-essential IDE for the language. My “Google Lab” became a hundred times more useful when I discovered RStudio Server. For Chromebook users, Compute Engine instances are easily accessed through a web-based ssh client. Relatively inexpensive, you get complete control over a virtual machine, which is securely stored in the cloud, but can also be made, unmade and played with at the click of a button, and if you have a big processing job you can just create a more powerful instance for it (or three).
But I’ve found them ideal for research too. Like other cloud hosting platforms (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc.) it’s mainly for providing the infrastructure for web applications. You can install another Linux distro alongside ChromeOS easily and relatively seamlessly with crouton, giving you a traditional desktop environment to work with locally, but given Chromebooks’ underwhelming hardware, developing even simple models on them is a non-starter.Īfter a while using a university server, this year I moved all my lab work to Google’s Compute Engine. It’s an interesting, ongoing challenge (a blog post for another day), but one thing I realised very early on was that I’d have to do any serious “lab work” (which for me is sitting at my desk playing with computational models) on a remote machine. When I started my PhD I decided to make my trusty fieldwork laptop – a Google Chromebook – my main work computer and try to do all my research in the cloud. RStudio Server on a Google Compute Engine instance
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