maghirardelli / service_workbench_templates

Templates for AWS Service Workbench from Relevance Lab

Relevance Lab Collaborates with Service Workbench on AWS for Open-Source Solutions

Relevance Lab RLCatalyst Research Gateway and Service Workbench on AWS (SWB) teams are committed to making scientific research frictionless for researchers. With a shared goal, this new initiative speeds up the collaboration and will help provide new innovative open-source solutions leveraging Service Workbench and partner-provided solutions like this RStudio with ALB from Relevance Lab. The collaboration efforts will soon be adding more solutions covering the Genomic Pipeline Orchestration with Nextflow, use of HPC Parallel Cluster, and secure research workspaces with AppStream 2.0, so stay tuned.

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 the right way. This is where software solutions like Service Workbench on AWS (SWB) 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 the Service Workbench. Researchers commonly use RStudio 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. With SWB, 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.

Relevance Lab (RL), in partnership with AWS, set out to make the experience of using RStudio with Service Workbench on AWS simple and secure.

For more information about the collaboration, click here

To get started with RStudio on SWB provided by Relevance Lab, click here

Relevance Lab (RL), in partnership with AWS, set out to make the experience of using RStudio with AWS Service Workbench simple and secure.

Getting started with EC2-RStudio-Server for Service Workbench on AWS

Sequence	Activities	Links
Step-1	Install the SWB Enterprise instance with Custom Domain. It is very important that the SWB instance is deployed with a custom domain option. This allows you to request an Amazon-issued certificate using ACM for your domain, and this certificate can then be used to provide secure access to your SWB instance and the resources provisioned using SWB.	Documentation Deployment guide
Step-2	Add ACM certificate to the hosting account. It is best to set up your SWB domain (e.g. swb.yourdomain.com) as its own hosted zone. See “Set up routing for your sub-domain”. Then request a new SSL certificate in AWS ACM	SSl Certificate in AWS ACM
Step-3	Install new EC2-Rstudio-Server Templates Clone the repo from Relevance Lab and run the script to create the AMI in your AWS account and the Service Catalog product in your SWB portfolio.	EC2-Rstudio-Server Templates hosted by Relevance Lab
Step-4	Log into SWB as Admin and detect the newly uploaded template (EC2-Rstudio-Server), import as Workspace Type and create the configuration	Configuration
Step-5	You can follow the steps on how to connect to the RStudio server instance.	How to connect

Registration for a new Customer and Support Process details

As shown below, Customers who wish to use Relevance Lab Custom Solution and wish to get support for issues, upgrades will need to signup as shown below. You can do so by clicking on the sign up button below.

Once signed up, Customers can raise an issue as shown below.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with SWB teams using an open-source model, we expect customers to need help with implementation, support, and ongoing enhancements of the above solutions. Sign up with Relevance Lab to start getting benefits.