Welcome to Hosting Data Apps!

By: Peter Solymos

You mastered Shiny and Dash. You followed best practices and your data application is production-ready. Now you only have to deploy and host your app. Information about hosting data apps is scattered around the Internet and often incomplete. Recommendations are usually narrowly focused and never really ask the important questions. Such as: Why do you want this app deployed? Who is it for? What is your budget? The goal of the Hosting Data Apps website is to help you learn about your hosting options. Depending on how you answer the questions you will be able to pick the option that suits your needs best.

Motivation

When I worked as a consultant, deployment was definitely the toughest problem to solve (well, toughest maybe after getting access to the data itself). – Bruno Rodrigues

The team at Analythium have worked with clients from a variety of sectors, large and small, and advised about hosting data applications. Over the years, we have seen some patterns emerge, and we decided that it is time to share our experiences in the form of this website.

Data applications are becoming more common. We have seen a shift from proof-of-concept and demo applications to business-critical dashboards and real-world decision support tools. Along this trend, we also saw the diversification of client and user needs that requires the authors and developers of these data apps to constantly evaluate their hosting strategy.

For those with an in-depth knowledge of internet security, it is possible, and more economical, to host the application independently by their own means. – Peter Kasprzak et al.

We have also noticed that clients want more control over their technology stack (branding, security, data regions) and costs. They are ready to invest into skill development to address their unique needs and to reduce the dependency on proprietary software/platform solutions.

What to expect

The following image captures the of DevOps cycle that combines practices related to software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops).

We will keep the Dev side of the cycle to a minimum on this website. There are truly great resources dedicated to general programming, data science, or app development, that we are not intending to repeat. Instead we will provide relevant pointers for you to quickly find reliable information on these topics.

This website focuses on the Ops side. We publish reviews to help in your decision making process when it comes to hosting data apps. We also share step-by-step tutorials describing the various options from 1-click deployments to self hosted clusters.

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