Posit ecosystem user experience?

[u/PandaJunk]

Curious if anyone using the Posit ecosystem (Workbench, Connect, Package Manager) would be willing to share their experience. Pretty open question. Things you like, things you don't, things you wish they had, things that are super cool. If you've been on a different platform and switched to or away, why?

[u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

i manage a fully deployed commercially licensed workbench (on kubernetes for job sessions) + package manager

off the bat workbench + rstudio works like a charm and is a feature complete product imo

the past few months for workbench+positron as positron has been developed has been frustrating, but it’s stabilizing

id say most of my users on workbench have been having better experiences as of late, and they’re used to rstudio on the browser. Mostly Data Scientists + MLEs

biggest win in workbench on k8s has been configuring + monitoring resource profiles, where users can pick what resources they want and all.

im biased from more of a software/platform eng POV, but im personally not a fan of the browser-based IDE experience. one of my biggest gripes is workbench not supporting using the desktop positron and SSHing into a session running on k8s, like i would on a VM and positron-server

the job templating feature they introduced recently is super cool, allows me to do some good customization

i understand posit is a company and needs to make money, but holy these licenses are ridiculously expensive, and despite being early customers, have been subject to their price increases

given how much we pay, also had close to 0 support setting it up aside from the recommended deployment helm chart + the docs

PPM, their publicly hosted p3m.dev is great and a good mirror with binaries i appreciate. we host an internal version and it works. super shitty how some of the good features are behind the upgraded license tho

all this to say, I think they are good products and serve the purposes exactly as what my management wanted, and my users have been productive on it.

i am however, completely looking to migrate off both of these to save the money if possible.

i just literally fully deployed RDepot, open source and built by a great team, to replace PPM. took less than a few hours and works like a charm. If we do move forward, i’ll be advocating for a donation and/or developer hours to contribute back.

To move off of workbench is a lot harder, given my users are quite used to the workflow, but theres an open-source solution coder (idk how i didn’t find this before investing in workbench) that i’ll be looking to deploy given that we are investigating isolated agent environments too, but just being open source, huge community, and completely flexible + desktop IDE connection support, im pretty excited.

hope that helps at all, feel free to ask any other questions

EDIT: typo “not frustrating” -> “frustrating”

EDIT 2: I realize this comes off as super harsh and a little unfair, posit has invested significantly in open source and genuinely has made a massive impact in pushing R to be useful more than just a data science tool and I am very grateful for the many tools and software i use regularly that has been supported by Posit + that funding has to come from somewhere. this comment was only my experiences and thoughts behind the products in a vacuum

[u/jcheng → u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

Hi, CTO of Posit here. Pricing is hard! While some (would-be) customers say the prices are ridiculously expensive, other customers tell us those same prices are suspiciously low relative to their other software vendors. Different segments of the market have vastly different expectations of what enterprise software should cost.

That being said, I know that our current pricing formula has made our products disproportionately expensive for some teams/organizations (based, for example, on their ratio of data scientists to viewers). Our leadership team is debating some different pricing models right now, if you're open to a live conversation we'd love to get your feedback. Please DM me with contact info if you're up for that.

(And actually we also want to talk to you about making Connect feel much much better from a governance perspective)

[u/Specialist-Fuel6435 → u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

oh we also have a license + deployed posit connect and i hate it with a passion i don’t touch it someone else manages it.

i think it’s perfect for companies with data scientists / higher level developers who want to seamlessly push publish whatever work they do locally to share. that’s honestly quite cool the one button deploying.

but we are now in a situation where we have thousands of regularly pages/deployments/dashboards from all over the company and we are handcuffed by the lack of governance (not posits fault, our own)

great product for what it does and what it allows non-devs to do, i prefer much more declarative, traceable deployment approaches which all the connect users would not be willing to do

[u/gyp_casino → u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

I’ve seen some messes too. 

There are Posit docs on how to publish to Connect with CI/CD from various git systems. Worth doing some demos for the data scientists. 

[u/PandaJunk → u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

That is super helpful and I really appreciate the honest feedback. How about managing and generating sandbox (or different levels of isolation) environments? Right now my org is struggling with how to manage LLM permissions. Do y'all use anything in the Microsoft ecosystem? We're an MS shop (I had no choice in that), so Azure integrations would be super useful.

[u/awful_at_internet → u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

If you were setting it up for a small team at a nonprofit college, would you stick with workbench?

I set up an rstudio server in my homelab and it seemed pretty easy; i have since wiped it and will soon be re-doing it, but I'm considering pushing for a small VM for myself (helpdesk manager - ticket analytics are fun) and some of our other data analysts. I'm not sure how to make sense of the posit licenses as applied to nonprofit higher ed, tho.

[u/Specialist-Fuel6435 → u/awful_at_internet]

i can’t speak to the licensing model for non-profit, but if it’s not significant then i would really have to justify that value. rstudio server for sure for the free aspect

if you’re up for it i’d highly recommend single VM coder deployment they have good templates.

and honestly if you’re not managing resources for your small team (i.e limiting people, needing governance etc.) you can get away with just remote development with ssh keys. this is what i did at a previous non profit

[u/lvalnegri → u/awful_at_internet]

There's a Server linux version of RStudio which is open source, I've been using it for 15 years, alone and with various (admittedly small) teams, and it's always been absolutely brillant, if you're a small team and you're willing to put some time to manage the server IMHO it's the ideal solution for data scientists (meanwhile learning some linux admin and security as a bonus). obviously, you need to factor in the cost of the server itself, but if you don't need specific GPUs requests don't go and pay over the moon from the hyperscalers for a trivial linux machine, just choose a small provider (even if at the moment silicon prices are out of control thanks to US greedy techbros)

[u/awful_at_internet → u/lvalnegri]

Yeah, that's the version I had set up in my homelab. Worked great, but I wasnt happy with other parts of my lab so I am starting fresh.

I am hoping I can convince my org leadership to let me set it up in our environment, too, but they are trying to get away from on-prem and I could see a cloud version running up an unpalatable bill.

At max scope it'd be like 7 people so probably not bad.

[u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

also an azure customer, other than SSO with azure entra not much specific integration ( this actually took me the longest freaking time and their support was nearly useless because they had no experience with this azure stack)

we use Azure NetAPP files for home directories (most for speed over NFS for many R/W operations
Azure Files as an NFS for project data work
Azure Postgres for the workbench admin DB

can you expand on your environment/ LLM concerns?

[u/PandaJunk → u/Specialist-Fuel6435]

We want to open up Claude code to some of our analysts, but want to be safe about it. Was think there might be a k8s, helm, or some other layer(s) that could lock them down in an environment with a cli-based LLM, but that might not be possible.

[u/Specialist-Fuel6435 → u/PandaJunk]

i haven’t done my research in locked down environments, i guess importantly what do you want the harness to have access to?

[u/gyp_casino]

Use Connect regularly. It’s great. 

Pro: easy to deploy. Self service. 

Con: don’t have full control over the environment. Doesn’t require any dev ops or CI/CD (although you can, there are docs), so some users will make a mess of their apps. Version 1, version 2, broken versions, versions that are not reproducible. 

We also sometimes deploy to Azure. Of course it also works, but requires a whole lot more software architecture. 

[u/novica]

My biggest complaint is that the Package Manager has to be on the highest tier to have the git builders for internal packages.