voltek62 / appengine-rstudio

Experiment deploying Rstudio to Google AppEngine

RStudio Appengine

Appengine is a managed compute service that recently started to support Docker environments that can run any code. This is a demo of deploying R.

Appengine offers benefits such as a free tier and auto scaling that turns off the instance when you are not using it. It reboots upon request of the application URL.

I wouldn't keep any data on the instance, but with the use of Google Cloud Storage you can preserve state.

Other applications of R on appengine include an R API via OpenCPU/plumber. Shiny sadly can't be supported yet as it uses websockets, that aren't yet supported on Appengine flexible containers.

Setup

Clone repo then in same directory run:

gcloud app deploy --project your-project

Demo: https://mark-rstudio.appspot.com (auth login only)

authentication

Instance has a Google OAuth2 proxy login over the normal RStudio login, you can configure access via https://console.cloud.google.com/iam-admin/gatekeeper/project

scaling config

The RStudio session disconnects on default scaling settings, as only one session is allowed per RStudio Server connection and appengine defaults to 2 https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/how-instances-are-managed

Configure app.yaml to get around this:

app.yaml configuration

See how to config the app.yaml here

Set to only 1 per instance with 30min timeout via:

automatic_scaling:
  min_num_instances: 1
  max_num_instances: 1

If you want the instance to run all the time, replace basic scaling with manual scaling:

manual_scaling:
  instances: 1

Flexible containers do not support basic_scaling

Instance size

You can set the size of the instance via the resources config:

e.g.

resources:
  cpu: 2
  memory_gb: 2.3
  disk_size_gb: 10
  volumes:
  - name: ramdisk1
    volume_type: tmpfs
    size_gb: 0.5

reference

https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200552316-Configuring-the-Server

https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker/blob/master/rstudio/testing/Dockerfile

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/an-overview-of-app-engine

debug

gcloud app --project [PROJECT-ID] instances enable-debug