We had 94 active users and could probably have supported quite a few more without problems. That used all my five elastic IP addresses and provided 124 vCPUs and 240 gigs of RAM. For a larger group, I ran two m3.2xlarge machines and three c4.8xlarge machines ($1.856/hour). I've led an introductory workshop with ten active participants on one EC2 m3.2xlarge, which runs at 56 cents per hour. (Some instance types are only available in VPC!)įor an in-person workshop, it can be effective to distribute login information on slips of paper like this:

Be sure your EC2 machine and elastic IP are both “EC2 classic” or both Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

You can optionally give your EC2 machine an AWS elastic IP address, which will let you start and stop the machine (avoiding the cost of keeping it running when you aren't using it) but still know in advance what address the machine will be accessible at.

(See documentation in the script itself.)

Run build_logins.sh, a script developed by Josh Tauberer, to create the desired number of user accounts.

Put necessary files (code, data, etc.) as desired in /home/rstudio (the prototypical user).

Install globally required packages while running R as root ( sudo R).

Secure Shell (SSH) into your EC2 machine and set up the environment as you want it to be.

Louis's page has good concise directions on how to do this-follow his directions!.

Spin up an AWS Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2) machine using Louis Aslett's RStudio Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Setting up RStudio Server is very easy, especially if you're already familiar with Amazon Web Services ( AWS): Somebody does have to set up the environment in advance though. In a workshop, it's very nice to be able to start doing things with R without messing with setup. To attain the setup shown, you go to a URL and log in. Here's what RStudio looks like in a browser. To attain the setup shown, you need to install R, install RStudio, install necessary R packages, separately download necessary code and data, and navigate to the correct working directory. Here's what RStudio looks like running locally. With RStudio Server, workshop participants can skip all that entirely. The most annoying part of R workshops is installing software and downloading necessary files.

RStudio in a Web Browser RStudio in a Web Browser

R studio online