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Sysadmin's review
December 18, 2020

Sysadmin's review

Leo Nootenboom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with RStudio

RStudio is used by multiple departments in our organisation mainly in the R&D area, quantitative genetics, breeding and bioinformatics.
  • RStudio staff is very knowledgeable and supportive.
  • The product documentation compared to other products we use is very good.
  • Product roadmap is interesting and suits our future needs.
  • For me the RStudio Launcher documentation (slurm/kubernetes) is not as clear as the rest. I had to put serious effort and a lot of trial and error to get all parts working.
  • Admin web interface should provide clusterwide information - not per server.
  • Developers are struggling to find a good way of working with tools like plumber & postman (web api) that start a locale service within RStudio server.
  • Similar while switching from local IDE to RStudio Server Pro some developers ran into issues using oauth authentication flows.
  • Hard to say right now, but we expect to reduce our support cost.
  • Integration with our HPC allows us to run jobs we could not easily do before.
  • Increased productivity.
We used opensource products and local installations, due to growth of the organization this becomes hard to manage
The Rstudio products come with excellent support and offer us a scalable and high available solution.
Also it offers us to integrate with other services our network, such as central LDAP, HPC, kubernetes platform and other RStudio products.
Most of the time I would recommend RStudio server:
  • Integration with slurm, ability to run jobs that could not be run on a local workstation/laptop.
  • Not have to troubleshoot local installations (dependency issues), sort out once on a central installation.
  • Integration with external authentication.
  • HA setup.

Less appropriate:
  • Less suited for developers who are used to have full freedom to do whatever they want on their workstation.

Evaluating RStudio and Competitors

Yes - replace opensource products

Why:
  • Additional features.
  • Standardize on a scalable HA service.
  • Support.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor

Using RStudio

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Familiar
None
  • Switching between sessions and R versions.
  • Launching a slurm job/session (once the setup is working).
  • Integration with other RStudio products.