I started using AWS at the recommendation of my supervisor, he host a few ESRI related products on AWS. AWSĪWS is a huge offering of 55 (at least) services to manage, store and run the cloud. As always, any input is greatly appreciated. AWS isn’t your only option, Digital Ocean, Heroku, Google, Microsoft all have similar offerings.

Depending on the sensitivity of your data and methods there may be easier options. I’ve learned all with the help of several online resource (I’ll link to those). I work for a small state agency (Department of Wildlife) and we don’t have people with those skills (unfortunately). I am not a SysAdmin, DevOps, or trained in any other computer science related fields. To solve these issues I’ve turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy Shiny apps and host our data on the cloud.Ī few caveats.

The sensitive nature of some of the data requires it be protected. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case for many small state agencies in rural states. I have several colleagues that work in remote offices, and some of these offices aren’t networked to these servers.

Most importantly all of these users were in the same office as me which allowed them to grab the data off of our server (in-house). Most of the first users were beta-testers checking the functionality and providing feature requests. When I first started developing these apps I would send instructions to my coworkers explaining how to install R, RStudio, the packages they needed, and how to run the app from GitHub. I’ve used it to develop exploratory data analysis and visualization tools for my coworkers.

The Shiny web framework for R is great, and one of my most frequently used packages.

Aws shiny server