Enable R development at scale with RStudio on Amazon SageMaker

2023-05-18

RStudio is now available on Amazon SageMaker, helping IT and DevOps leaders enable their organization’s data professionals using R at scale.

As more and more organizations adopt open source data science projects as a core component of their business, many leaders in IT find themselves struggling to scale their organization’s open source data strategy and corral data science work from the wild west of individual laptops to a more secure and centralized environment.

Building and maintaining centralized data science infrastructure can be difficult. IT leaders must understand their organization’s policies, their users’ needs, the tools being used (both open source languages like R and Python and proprietary databases and other systems data professionals need to integrate with), as well as the resources available to them to deliver what their users need to do great work.

Thankfully, cloud platforms like Amazon SageMaker have made it possible for IT leaders to quickly and easily enable access to data science tools like the RStudio Pro IDE.

Scale development environments automatically

With RStudio on Amazon SageMaker, there’s no need to manage development infrastructure for your R and Python coders. Users can choose their editor (RStudio Pro or SageMaker Studio Jupyterlab) and an appropriately-sized EC2 instance for their session, and begin coding with just a few clicks. Users’ sessions are independent, so there’s no risk of one user overconsuming resources and affecting another user’s work.

Integrate with AWS services like IAM, S3, and License Manager

Organizations using other parts of the AWS ecosystem can also benefit from native integrations available in RStudio on Amazon SageMaker. Sessions launched from SageMaker are provisioned with users’ Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, making it possible for users to interact with other AWS services without needing to provide credentials or re-authenticate. Administrators can create execution roles to be associated with users within their SageMaker domain, and users will have access to these credentials in their RStudio sessions. For example, R users can use the paws package to access data stored in S3 from an RStudio Pro session on SageMaker without having to type their credentials in their code.

RStudio on Amazon SageMaker also uses AWS License Manager to manage Posit Workbench licenses, making it easier to grant Posit Workbench licenses to desired AWS accounts.

Customize sessions by bringing your own Docker image

RStudio on Amazon SageMaker provides a default image which is used to create the development environment needed to run RStudio Pro, including multiple versions of R and Python, package repositories and configuration settings, and other system dependencies. Administrators can also use their own custom images with RStudio on SageMaker to tailor the development environment where users write their code for teams or projects with varying requirements.

Meet compliance standards like FedRAMP, HIPAA, and SOC

For organizations who need to meet strict standards of compliance, Amazon SageMaker is compliant with FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 1/2/3, PCI, and other standards. RStudio on Amazon SageMaker provides a secure, compliant way for data professionals to work with sensitive data. For more information about security and compliance on AWS, contact your AWS account team.