Cloud computing offers the research community access to vast amounts of computational power, storage, specialized data tools, and public data sets, collectively referred to as Research IT, with the added benefit of paying only for what is used. However, researchers may not be experts in using the AWS Console to provision these services in the right way. This is where software solutions like EC2-RStudio-Server make it possible to deliver scientific research computing resources in a secure and easily accessible manner.

RStudio is a popular software used by the Scientific Research Community and supported by Service Workbench. Researchers use RStudio very commonly in their day-to-day efforts. While RStudio is a popular product, the process of installing RStudio securely on AWS Cloud and using it in a cost-effective manner is a non-trivial task, especially for researchers. The goal is to make this process very simple, secure, and cost-effective for researchers so that they can focus on science and not servers thereby increasing their productivity.