Chapter 14 Posit Connect

Posit Connect is a solution that you self-host on your virtual machine to deploy your Shiny application. It offers one-click deployment similar to other Shiny deployment platforms.

Posit Connect is a product Posit to deploy and share data science work across teams. Data scientists can use Posit Connect to securely share results in the form of reports or interactive apps like Shiny, automate and scale the execution of tasks. For system administrators, it offers detailed metrics and logs, secure deployments and configuration options.

Posit Connect is a self-hosted system which means that customers are responsible to pay licensing fee and operating costs for hosting servers that meet the requirements of the team using the product. Licensing fee is currently not shared on the website, last published pricing started $15,000 USD per year. Discounts might be available for small businesses and academic institutions.

Posit Connect only comes as the software itself, server costs are entirely independent of Posit Connect. The recommended requirements of Posit Connect, at the time of writing, includes 4+ CPUs, 8+ GB of RAM, 100+ GB of disk storage. For reference a typical configuration with the minimum hardware requirements would be at least $480 USD a year with a cloud provider like DigitalOcean.

In general, the larger the team, the more capable server you’ll need to handle the workload. In the end, server costs can easily be multiples of this minimum cost with factors such as larger teams, backups, mounted volumes. Having multiple servers for development, staging, and production environments, or a high availability setup using a compute cluster.

Posit Connect can host Shiny apps, R markdown and Quarto documents, APIs, Jupyter Notebooks, Streamlit, Dash, and many more. Shiny apps can be deployed with a click of a button right from the RStudio IDE or through Git repository integration.

As a user, no DevOps skills are required, but as an admin/maintainer you will have the responsibility of configuring and managing the server(s) that Posit Connect is running on including setting up HTTPS for secure connections to the server. Besides Posit Connect itself, you have to install R, Python, system dependencies, packages etc. The Posit Workbench and the Posit Package Manager might be needed for more complex setups to organize and centralize packages across your organization. The server might also need to have professional drivers for various database backends to support data persistence.

In terms of the meeting scaling and performance needs, Posit Connect allows for the complete control over the deployment environment, with no limitations on active hours or the number of applications that can be deployed, aside from server capabilities. These capabilities can be upgraded as necessary to meet performance demands. Full control over the servers running Posit Connect allows for hosting in any data region, allowing for compliance with data residency laws. Further, Posit Connect comes with a set of security and auditing features including guaranteeing HTTPS and audit logs. Another security responsibility is operating system patching for the maintained server.

Posit Connect integrates with various third-party products and authentication providers for user authentication, including options for single sign-on (SSO) such as Azure Entra, Google OpenID, Kerberos, etc. Authenticated users are assigned roles (administrator, publisher, viewer, or anonymous) that dictate their default capabilities. Permissions for accessing and managing content is determined by content owners and can be managed through user groups. Notably, anonymous users do not need to authenticate, and only authenticated users count towards the pricing model based on named users.

Full control over the server address enables the selection of a preferred domain or subdomain, allowing for customization of the web address for how users access the Shiny app. This enhances user experience and reinforces brand identity, making it easier for users to recognize and connect with the application.

Support for Posit Connect is available through Posit itself, its certified partners, and the wider community making Posit Connect a highly supported hosting solution. It is also a fast evolving product, so we won’t have instructions here but instead we refer interested readers to the Posit Connect admin guide at https://docs.posit.co/connect/admin/.

14.1 Summary

Posit Connect is the enterprise-level publishing solution for medium and large teams with powerful capabilities and integration possibilities. If you are looking for a comprehensive solution for your data science team, Posit Connect might be the best solution out there. If you are only looking for a way to host your Shiny apps, Posit Connect might be too expensive and you might want to pick another option instead.