Separation of compute and data - abstracting out the computing away from the data the computing is running on. Lift and Shift - moving your existing infrastructure into equivalent cloud versions. There they described three phases of business cloud evolution: I believe the reason for the dichotomy between expectation and reality is due to not being “Cloud Native” enough, something I realised whilst attending this year’s Google NEXT event. Not flexible enough - if you run out of RAM or want things to compute quicker, you are going to need to transfer your data and boot up another VM with stronger specs.īut isn’t the allure of cheaper, safer, more flexible computing the reason we are using the cloud in the first place? Going Cloud Native. A physical laptop is a lot easier to troubleshoot if something goes awry. Unable to log in, a convoluted panic to increase the disk size occurred. More risky - keeping the only copy of your data on a cloud server is not a good idea, as I learnt to my cost when a VM’s hard disk filled up. For a proper workstation with decent RAM etc, you are looking at more like 30 dollars a month, which if you’re running for 2 years is around $700 that you could have spent on a laptop that can do more things. More expensive - running RStudio Server permanently in the cloud can be done for as little as 5 dollars a month, but for that you get a machine about as powerful as a Raspberry Pi. Yes, the convenience of running RStudio in a browser and being able to launch different configurations is great, but it wasn’t a total desktop replacement for the following reasons: To date I’ve treated RStudio Server as a temporary UI whilst setting up scheduled scripts and so forth, and for running workshops for students with pre-installed packages. 
Whilst there are lots of other solutions around for hosting RStudio Server in the cloud, including some of my own, I don’t believe they are a serious replacement for a desktop station running RStudio. TL DR - A how-to on making RStudio Server run on a Chromebook that automatically backs up data and configuration settings to Google Cloud Storage is on the googleComputeEngineR website here. I recently got an Asus Chromebook Flip with which I’m very happy, but it did make me realise that if a Chromebook was to replace my normal desktop as my primary workstation, my RStudio Server setup would need to be more cloud native than was available up until now.
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