Build and Deploy AI-Powered Data Products Without Leaving Snowflake: Introducing the Posit Team Native App

At Posit, our goal is to make it seamless for data scientists to turn data into insights, wherever that data lives. We provide a code-first environment for R and Python that emphasizes collaboration and reproducibility. Snowflake provides the industry’s premier data platform, where data, governance, compute, and applications can all live together.

By bringing Posit’s best-in-class data science tools directly into the Snowflake Data Cloud, we can unlock tremendous value for data scientists and the platform teams that support them.

The Challenge: Scaling Data Science in the Enterprise

Data scientists thrive on rapid iteration, leveraging powerful open-source tools and LLMs to accelerate their work. However, scaling these workflows in an enterprise setting often introduces friction. Security requirements, governance controls, and the overhead of managing complex environments can slow down the very processes these tools were meant to speed up.

The challenge is to wrap these essential open-source tools in an enterprise-grade layer that provides security, governance, and simplified management directly where the data lives.

The Solution: The Posit Team Native App

Today, we are proud to announce our answer: the Posit Team Native App on Snowflake. With this app, your team can manage its entire data science lifecycle—from development to deployment—without data ever leaving the Snowflake security boundary.

Let’s walk through how this transforms the data science workflow.

Instant Setup: Your Data Science Environment in Minutes

Get an enterprise-grade data science platform running in minutes, not weeks. The Posit Team Native App, available on the Snowflake Marketplace, packages Posit Workbench (for development) and Posit Connect (for deployment) into a single application running on Snowpark Container Services.

As a first step, install the Posit Team Native App, and then configure your Workbench and Connect services using a simple UI-driven modal. All of this setup can be done in minutes, enabling you to get started with your data science workflows instantly.  

Secure and Seamless Connection to Snowflake

After launching Posit Workbench, you can choose your preferred IDE: Positron, RStudio, VS Code, or JupyterLab. 

Once in your IDE, Posit Workbench seamlessly handles authentication. It automatically uses your inherited Snowflake role and credentials, so you can connect to your data without ever having to expose or manage credentials in your code. This allows you to focus on your analysis, not on boilerplate connection code.

AI-Assisted Development

Accelerate Exploration (EDA) with Databot

For the foundational (and often, most time-consuming) part of any data project, we’ve introduced Databot in Positron. Databot is an AI agent designed to accelerate exploratory data analysis (EDA). If you give Databot a high-level instruction, it will write and execute code, analyze the output, and suggest the next steps, keeping you in the loop the entire time. Because it has access to the context of your IDE, it understands your dataframes and variables, allowing it to generate precise and relevant code. It’s also efficient, pushing down queries to Snowflake to minimize data movement.

Build Faster with Positron Assistant

After exploring the data, the next step is often to share your insights. With the help of Positron Assistant, an “out of the box” LLM-powered assistant in the IDE, you can accelerate the development of data products like interactive Shiny or Streamlit apps. Get help with code generation, explanation, and debugging to build your application faster.

(Note: Positron Assistant and Databot currently support models from Anthropic, but we plan to support LLMs from Snowflake Cortex in the future.)

One-Click Deployment to a Governed Application

One-Click Deployment to Posit Connect

Once your app is ready, you can deploy it to Posit Connect with a single click from your IDE. Because Workbench and Connect are running in the same Native App, the complex network and authentication challenges of connecting separate development and deployment environments are eliminated. Posit Connect handles the dependencies and ensures your code runs successfully as a deployed artifact.

Interactive and Governed Insights with Snowflake Cortex

The deployed application can provide an interactive, natural language interface for exploring your data. By using open-source packages like querychat and chatlas, your app can leverage Snowflake Cortex to translate user questions into SQL.

Crucially, the app automatically inherits the viewer’s Snowflake permissions, enabling powerful, row-level security out-of-the-box. This ensures that users can only see the data they are authorized to see, providing a direct link between a user’s question and the governed result.

A Better Experience for Platform Teams

The Posit Team Native App also removes management overhead for platform teams.

• Reduced Management Overhead: The app is fully managed with automatic upgrades and backups, all running within your Snowflake security perimeter.
• Simplified Administration: A consistent Admin UI allows for critical tasks like resizing compute pools, managing backups, and adding users. Access to this UI is controlled through Snowflake roles.

Get Started Today

In summary, with the Posit Team Native App, you get:

• Instant Setup 🚀: Get an enterprise-grade data science platform running in minutes, not weeks.
• No Ops Headache 🛡️: A fully managed experience with automatic upgrades, running within your Snowflake security perimeter, and inherited governance.
• Improved Productivity 🧠: Accelerate your data science workflow with integrated AI tools and a seamless path from development to deployment.

Ready to get started? Find the Posit Team Native App on the Snowflake Marketplace. If you would like to learn more, please reach out to us.

Already have the Posit Workbench app and need to migrate? Follow the steps in our Migration Guide.