Posit Cloud Essentials | Ep 2: Managing Data Projects with Spaces

Hello again. We are live on YouTube for this second episode of Posit Cloud Essentials. My name is Alex Chisholm. I'm part of the Posit Cloud here at PositPBC, where we build tools that make it easier for you and your teams to do R and Python work and then share that work out more broadly. Last month in Episode 1, we did a crash course on getting started in Posit Cloud, and this time I wanted to go a little bit deeper on the features and functionality that can help you manage data projects, specifically when working in these shared spaces on Posit Cloud.

And as we discussed last time, Posit Cloud is really designed around this notion of a space. From within a space, you can start new projects, either RStudio or Jupyter Notebooks at the moment. We also have a new functionality that we'll tease a little bit later called Project Templates. From these projects or from off Posit Cloud, so like a VS Code on your desktop or RStudio IDE somewhere else, you can publish outputs now to that space, including dynamic applications, as well as static documents like Quarto or R Markdown. Another feature we added this year was Data Connections, where we make it easier for you to save the credentials associated with various database connections. We have the professional drivers behind the scenes here that enable you to save these and then pass them into projects to be used both in terms of analysis and publishing.

And then finally, you can bring people in, control what they see and do, and then monitor what people are doing based upon that engagement with your content. So this was the simple view that we provided last month. In reality, if you've been in Posit Cloud before, you probably noticed when you start, you go into what's known as this Your Workspace, and it's a little bit less feature-packed than a shared space that we were talking about before.

So here's a comparison between Your Workspace, which we'll take a look at in a few moments, and a shared space. In both of these environments, you can create projects, you can publish outputs, you can see what's being done, and you can manage a little bit in terms of filtering and narrowing into what specific piece of content you might be interested in. You can also, from either of these spaces, use the included pre-configured templates that are now available from Posit Cloud to get started faster.

On the shared space side, you're going to notice a bunch more functionality that picks up what we talked about in the previous slide. So here you can do things with member management, you can have those data connections, you can organize things into lists, you can create custom templates. So there's a lot more going on within a shared space. And typically, when we're working with organizations who are bringing on multiple collaborators, either in terms of doing data science work in a collaborative way, or sharing out different pieces of outputs, like an application or a dashboard, or a document, you're going to have the ability to set these up more easily within a shared space.

Demo use case: consulting workflow

All of these things on the bottom, I think, really help with data project management. And what I want to do today is talk through kind of a demo use case that focuses on a freelancer or a consulting group, and then thinking of where the work fits into how we've designed Posit Cloud from this space's perspective. So the first thing that is really nice, especially now when you can publish all types of outputs to Posit Cloud directly, you know, in the consulting workflow, typically, either you're working with one company or a company has put out maybe an RFP, a request for a proposal, you're going out and saying, hey, I'm really good at this stuff, you should consider me to do this project for you.

It helps a lot, whether you're an individual or a team, to have a space where you can show off the type of work that you are accustomed to doing. So you can use Posit Cloud to be that kind of portfolio place to show off and hopefully win the contract. If you win the opportunity to continue with a client, you can then set up another dedicated shared space. So all those things we looked at a few moments ago, but within one dedicated environment that you can use for the entirety of that project, from which you can invite people who are going to help you out doing the data work on this. You can ultimately bring in the client at the end of this to see either the outputs or the data projects themselves in some cases.

And then at the end, for peace of mind on that client side, it's quite easy for you to delete the entire project and the entire space if you wanted to. And maybe you're able to take some of the outputs that you worked on, make them anonymous or generalizable, and then move those back into your sample gallery for the next time that you're going through this process.

So today I'm going to jump into the tool in just a few seconds. We're going to look at it from two perspectives. One is going to be the lead consultant or the project manager at Allegro LLC, a small consulting group focused on marketing analytics for the performing arts industry. So we're going to see how Posit Cloud might be used from their point of view. And then we're also going to see the other side, the client side. So Allegro went out, they responded to an RFP from the Bartok Music Festival. They're hoping to win this proposal that they put together so they can do work together to help the music festival increase sales for the upcoming season. So with that as a primer or as a starting point, we're going to jump over now and move into Posit Cloud.

Portfolio space: organizing and sharing sample work

For those of you who already have an account, here's where you would just log in, right? If you don't have an account yet, you can click on Get Started, go through and find out about the free plan that we offer, and you can sign up easily in a variety of ways. I have an account, so I'm just going to go ahead and log in, and I'll do it through Google in this case.

So the first thing that I want to think through, and this is, again, the perspective from this lead consultant at Allegro, is trying to use previous work to get more work, right? To show people what you're capable of so that you can do something similar for their organization. And I've got a space set up already called Allegro Sample Work. And there are only four pieces of content here, but we'll do a few things to get this ready to turn into that portfolio that we're going to be able to share with potential clients.

There are a lot of options up here, and we're not going to have time today to talk through everything, but let's just start on the far right here with About. So this gives you the opportunity to, in addition to you could change the name of the space overall, you could also put in a little blurb about what this space is for. So we can tell people, you know, welcome, here's what we've done in the past, and we're going to be able to use this space to show off some of the applications, some of the reports that we've done before. If you have questions, you know, there's a way to reach out to us. So this is once we've prepped this space in a way that'll be good for someone who just wants to view your content, they'll have some guidance point to get started with.

If I go back to content, you know, we can take a quick look at the existing content that's in this space. And you can look at the metadata here and tell what everything is. So we have a Quarto document. We've got an RStudio project that is on ticket attribution modeling. We have a Shiny application looking at lead funnels, and we have a Streamlit app talking about customer segmentation. So these are all generalizable things maybe that Allegro LLC has done in the past that they want to demonstrate to a new client their capabilities.

I can click on, you know, any one of these and see, you know, this is something that has been created on PositCloud and published to PositCloud, and it's a Quarto report. In this case, just an example of having an industry trends report talking to the state of performing arts in 2023.

One thing that we did not discuss last time was how you would kind of interact with and organize this content. So let's focus on just a few things off the bat. First is the ability to filter. As we've added more content types to PositCloud, it can get quite complex what your content list looks like because there's so many things you could build. So you can go through here and filter, right? So if you only wanted to look for that project, whether it was Jupyter Notebook or RStudio IDE, I can click on project, and I can see the one RStudio project that I have. I can go and look at applications, and I can find myself with the Shiny app and the Streamlit app that I mentioned.

We've added more granularity to this as well, as the type of content that you can now publish to PositCloud has really grown, both on the application side and the document side as well. So you can filter that way. You can change by access to only show me things that are publicly available to people that are in my space. Right now, we have no one in our space. And actually, if I click on space members, only one of them right now is designated to be seen by anybody else. Finally, I can sort them either based upon their name or their create date, or I can go ahead and I can search via text and pull up a ticket attribution model. So if you have very, very long lists here, the search functionality, the filter functionality tends to help out.

There is one more way that you can interact and organize your data, and these are things called lists. So maybe we create a new list, and we'll call it deliverables. I have the choice, do I want only admins to see this, or do I want everybody in Allegro in this space? I'm going to make it available for everybody, because ultimately, I'm going to open this up for potential clients. So once I have my list here, if I click on it, you'll see that it's empty. You can go back and just drag in everything you want. So maybe this document was a deliverable, the Shiny application itself, the Streamlit app. So these things that we handed off to clients, and this will be the takeaways from the consulting engagement.

And if I click deliverables now, you're able to see this kind of list that you put together on your own. If you wanted to do the actual data projects, maybe you wanted to show somebody your coding ability from the raw source data or source code, we could make one called data projects. I'll just drag over that ticket attribution model into data projects, and now I'm able to filter down at a much more refined list than what you might get from just standard filtering.

I'll just drag over that ticket attribution model into data projects, and now I'm able to filter down at a much more refined list than what you might get from just standard filtering.

So this, in essence, is how you can organize a bunch of information and content within a space. Now, let's get to the point where we're sharing this out with a client. So you could put together, think of putting together the proposal. I'm really interested in what you're looking to do. We have this experience. Here's a link. Please join MySpace on PositCloud and see everything that we can do in an interactive way.

So let's make all of these publicly or space member available. Last time, we looked at this dot, dot, dot on each piece of content. If you click on that and go to access, you're going to be able to see that you can change it from private for your eyes only to space members. I'm just going to do the same thing for all four of these because we want a potential client to see everything that we have to offer in this space.

So now we've put all this together and we have these things that are able to be shared out. The problem is we don't have a member within our space right now to see these things. So we can click on the membership tab and this is going to tell us who has access to what and what is their role within this space. So I'm going to click on add members. One way to do this, I can bring people in by email address, but this is going to be a pretty generalizable space in the sense that we might send this out to many potential clients. So it probably is easier for us to use a sharing link and then we have to define what role do we want for this person who's going to join this space to have. And if you click on the information button here, you can find out more about admins and moderators and contributors and viewers. Right now we only really want people to be able to see what's in this space. So I'm going to go with this viewer role and I'm also going to ensure that down at the bottom this tab is unchecked. So when I do invite a viewer, they cannot view the membership space, the membership list, unless someone has clicked this. So right now it'll be a pretty vanilla space, but they'll be able to see that content that we want them to.

So I'm going to copy this shared link.

Client perspective: joining the portfolio space

All right. At the moment, I'm going to scroll down to see if any questions are coming out on this specifically before we jump over into the client account to see how they would interact with that app or that link that we just copied. I don't see anything coming in right now. So let me switch over to a different screen.

Good. So I think now you can see my other screen and this is going to be the client. So this is going to be Bartok Music Festival and we had just given them that link that we copied to share this portfolio space out with them. When they click on this, they're going to have a path or a choice decision, right? So you're going to need for people you share with to have a PositCloud account and they can create a free account that goes on to your space. In this case, I already have one set up on this machine and just a free Google account. So I'm going to go ahead and log in with Google and it should bring me back to the invitation page directly.

So you can see that we've been asked to join this space and because I trust a link that came in from the person who is applying or making a proposal for this consulting gig, I'm going to click yes. And the first thing I'm going to see is that introductory text that we put in the About tab when we were acting on the behalf of Allegro LLC. So information about why people are here, maybe what the next steps might be. And then the potential client can click on content.

And all of those items that we made available to our space members are now available to this potential client. So if I click on this Quarto doc, they're able to see now whatever content we want to surface, whatever project we want to surface for them to get an understanding of the capabilities of our consulting team. You might notice another thing compared to the previous screen when we were looking from the consultant's point of view. When we made this person a viewer, you know, now there's no ability to create a new project, which is probably good. There's no ability to move or copy or do anything with this. Pretty much they're just getting a list of what they can interact with, what they can engage with. And then they can say, you know, this is either going to help me make a decision for hiring this specific consultant or not.

Setting up a dedicated client space

So let us take the optimistic approach and say that the client was impressed enough by the portfolio that we put together for them that they're going to want to go ahead, give the contract out to Allegro LLC. And we'll think of now the second part of this demo, which is saying, now I have a new client. I have a bunch of requirements that I need to bring in in terms of where I'm going to do work for them. Let's focus on that stream next.

So we're back into Allegro LLC's space. That was the portfolio work. But now we're ready to go ahead and build up an actual space for the work that's going to be done. And what's nice about Posit Cloud is when you're creating environments, everything that you do doesn't cascade to all future projects. You're able to make these siloed, reproducible environments that are dedicated to one specific workflow. So to do this, I'm going to go down to the end of my list of spaces and create a new space. And let's just call this Allegro Barcock.

You likely won't need to choose this. I have many accounts associated with this one account, but it'll just be tying back to the specific account that you happen to own. And I'm going to create this new space. And now we have a completely blank space that we can start building up. And we know that within this space, we want to be able to do the work for the consultant. And we know that we also want to, at the end of it, be able to bring the consultant in. So we can do some things to clean it up and make it feel a little bit welcoming for that client who will ultimately come. The first is we named it. We included the name of the client's organization.

Just like before, I can go to About, and maybe I drop in some information about how we have data projects. We have outputs from this project. We talk about the date that the contract might start, when it might end, and how long we will keep this information within the space before deleting it, unless we hear differently from the client about what we should do with the data sets and the projects and the outputs that might come from it.

Now, depending on the nature of this consulting company, you might have a project manager or a partner that are going to go through after they win the contract. And they're going to say, well, we're going to bring in now an analyst to this team. We're going to bring in a data scientist. We could do that. I don't want to go back and forth between too many screens. But we could bring in members and give them more advanced rights than that viewership role. So I could make them an admin or a moderator or a contributor that would allow other people from within my team to do meaningful work on behalf of this client.

But for the sake of this, we're just going to go ahead and get started by doing work from this one account, this lead consultant approach. So we know that the consultant is going to give us two things. They're going to give us, one, some flat data files that we're going to want to bring in to a project. But they also might give us a database credential. And from a shared space, I can actually go in here and say, well, maybe the consultant is using Postgres. So this could be client connection, VB, doesn't matter what we call it. And I would have a bunch of information that I could fill this in here with. And maybe it's a read-only connection from their databases. I could then go ahead and save this connection. And I'm going to be able to pass this connection through to all the other projects and potentially the other outputs that I'm going to eventually deliver to the client.

We're not going to get too much into data connections. At some point, we'll have a standalone Positive Cloud Essentials talking about them directly. But for now, I just wanted to say one way of information, one way of getting information from the client into the projects for this engagement would be through data connections.

But now I just want to go through and create a new RStudio template. And maybe we call this dashboard prep. Maybe one of the things that the client wanted was looking at all their historic data, putting together a view of what ticket sales and revenue has looked like for the last several years. We're going to skip all of those steps. But I want to show you what the flow would look like. So now we've created an RStudio project that sits within the Allegro Bartok space, dedicated to this client engagement.

And from here, we can do what you would expect to be able to do from within an IDE. I'm going to go ahead and make a new Shiny app. Because this is our first time in the project, it is like a blank canvas. It's up to you to fill it with the packages you need, the scripts you might want, any supplemental data you can bring in. You only need to do it one time. And after that, you're going to be able, when you come back into the project, you'll have all these assets that are that are ready for you. So maybe we'll just call this dashboard test for now.

We've created a script in an app for this Shiny app. And because PositCloud is an integrated, unified experience, you can go straight from doing the code within PositCloud to publishing to PositCloud. So again, I need to install a few more packages. This is going to give me what I need to publish anywhere. But to PositCloud specifically, it facilitates that as well. And now I can hit publish.

For this sample app, which should pop up in roughly a minute, you're going to see that we can then publish it. It becomes an asset within the space. And we can decide who can see or who cannot see the output. While you're waiting, there's another thing to show as a reminder. Because we're up in the cloud, you're able to change your memory allocated to this project. You're able to change your CPU, your background execution time. You can play with things like the name. You can add a description. All these sort of toggles you can do from the project itself while keeping an eye on some of those compute resources. And I can see now that the output, the Shiny app, is very close to publishing. It should open up a new tab for me.

And I'm going to have to change the screen that I'm sharing on. So let me switch tabs very quickly here. Yep. And I see it on our stream as well. So this is the interactive application that the consultant just made, in theory, right, based upon the information from our specific client.

So very cool. Like, we took just a few steps. We were able to create a project, publish another output. If I go back to my content list, we can see that we have these two things. We have this app and we have this project.

Project Templates

Now, just because I want to tease a little bit of a new feature that came out two weeks ago, which is called Project Templates, I want to show you how you can turn this, what you just did, right? We went into that project. We installed different packages. We created a Shiny app. Well, imagine if you wanted to have multiple projects, each of which already having the same libraries, maybe the same datasets, some of the same starter applications for you to do more work. You can turn all that work you just did into a template and then use that customized template again and again when creating new projects. And the way that you do it is simply to do what we did. We set up the environment that we wanted. Now I can click on Settings, go into Access, and I can say, Make this project a template.

As I clicked on Make this project a template, you notice that this template banner or tag came up within our space. And if I click on this new item called Templates, you'll see that this is the one template that we currently have that was made and created and is able to be used from this Allegro Bartok shared space. Now, if you wanted to use this template to start a new project a little bit faster, you then click on New Project, the first time we selected a blank RStudio project. But if you want to do it from template, now not only do you have a bunch of pre-configured templates that Posit has put together for you to get started faster, you have the one that you created specifically. So if you use a lot of custom templates or a lot of custom scripts and you find yourself always installing these again and again into projects, templates is a great way to get started faster.

If you click OK, this would turn into just another project that could be shared and that could publish and be shared with others as well. But for now, we're not focusing on templates today. I'm going to turn this off. I'm not going to make this a template anymore. It's going to disappear. The template tag will disappear. And now we're left with these two assets that we have and we eventually want the client to take a look at.

Sharing the final deliverable with the client

So depending on the client, you may or may not want to share your source code, right? Some want to see that. Others might just want to see the application. Let's go ahead and take the assumption that all we're going to share with the client is going to be the final dashboard. We'll come up with a really creative name here. Call it final dashboard. We can add a description. All the ticket trend data required for this project. We've got a name. We've got a description. I can then make this available to all space members.

And now when I come back here, we can see that this dashboard has a little bit more information. It's available for all space members. And our project itself, the raw code, has remained private.

Just like before, we now want to find a way to bring the client into this space to see the results. So maybe you have the final presentation with them tomorrow or next week. You want them to have access to all this stuff beforehand. So when you're sitting down, you can go through it together.

When we were thinking about the portfolio gallery that was very generic and there was nothing sensitive in there to a specific client, we just used a sharing link, which was a generic link that anybody that came across could actually use to get within your space. Maybe for this, we want to make an invitation required. And we're going to go out through email directly so that we don't risk putting out one of those generic links that are out there. We still want to bring them in as a viewer. We don't want them to see a lot of the other bells and whistles. We just want them to hone in on that final dashboard. So I'm going to bring them in as a viewer. I guess it doesn't really matter if we turn the membership list on or off for them. I'll leave it on for now just to show the difference.

What I want to do is take the email address associated with that account, which I have. I'm pasting it right now. I want to turn them into a viewer. And then I can send them a message to join this space, looking forward to our conversation tomorrow. Here is the final dashboard. If I add, it's going to come back and verify that we sent an invitation directly to that email address. And for the final time, let me bounce to the other screen where we're going to look at what this looks like from the client perspective.

Okay, so we're starting now when this comes up. We are in Gmail. You can see the invitation that was just sent to our client. The message that we put together, we're looking forward to our conversation. Here's the final dashboard. And now we're sending that invitation to join that space that we created. Again, they're going to be forced to log in through their credentials that they already have for PositCloud. Once they do that, they should be able to see the invitation or they accepted it directly, so it went through. They're now within this space that our lead consultant created. The lead consultant made a project and an application. All we can really see here is that shiny app that we want them to see.

The client can go in and see the information we left about what this space is and some of the details about the project. You can actually see who else has access to this space, so maybe this again is something that's good for peace of mind from the client side, how many people have eyeballs on the analysis and outputs from the project. And then finally, the client can click on this, load it, and interact with the advanced dashboard that we put together that ultimately would be looking at the differences in ticket sales over time for their Bartok Music Festival.

Wrap-up and Q&A

I know we covered a lot of information in that short trip. We were going back and forth between how a data doer, a data publisher might work, and then how somebody who is just viewing, especially in terms of what a client might expect from an engagement like this. What I'd like to do now is pull up one more tab just to wrap up. So we talked through these two cases and we started with this notion of like seeing what can be done within a space. And I think a combination of all of these, when you add in especially membership management, role-based permissions, and then the ability to tweak some of the specifics under each one of those roles. And then one thing that we didn't look at was the user analytics. Me as the consultant being able to tie back, has the client viewed this information? Which assets have they looked at? How much have they been using it? Like it works really well for these workflows when you're doing maybe a short-term project with a group of people, you want to maintain that environment that is specifically guarded for them. And then at the end of that whole sequence, you have the ability to say, well, we can just delete this space if that's what the client has in mind through the terms of the contract.

So I think at that point, we're going to hand things over for any Q&A that might have come in. Hannah is with me from Posit, and I think she's going to help moderate whatever might have come in. Hey, everyone. Hey, Alex. As Alex mentioned, I'm on the marketing team at Posit, so I'm just going to help feed some of the questions over that have been coming through the chat. Just a reminder, if you still have questions, we're still taking them. You can submit them in the YouTube chat or using the Slido link that we shared earlier.

So to start out, we've got a couple of questions that came in. So first, one question is, what are the pros and cons compared to Posit Workbench and Posit Connect? Yeah, that's a great question. I know a lot of the people we're speaking with recently have experience with those self-hosted products. So for those who do not know, this is when you're taking Workbench and Connect. These are things where you can author and publish data science. You're putting them on your own servers. You're maintaining those. You have full control and customization about what you can do in those environments. Posit Cloud is really, at this stage, a subset of a lot of that feature and functionality set done in a purely SaaS environment where we take care of all of the infrastructure. It's a multi-tenant solution. So there are going to be trade-offs on things like complete control over security is one thing to be aware of. And also, some of our functionality at the moment is not yet as advanced.

So if you think of Connect, if you think of email, job scheduling, or report scheduling for updates, and emailing out, we don't yet have that functionality within Posit Cloud. But over time, we're going to be adding and improving on both those dimensions, the functionality set and the security set. For those who are able to operate in a cloud environment, we expect Posit Cloud is going to be a pretty proficient place for you to be doing so.

Awesome. Second question that came in was, does Posit Cloud have Docker image plugin like Workbench? No, at the moment, we do not have containerized support. And then Marlene asks, most of this navigation seems fairly intuitive. How long did it take you to get acclimated?

That's a good question. I actually started using Posit Cloud in 2018, I think, in the early stages because I was teaching a course on the side as a part-time adjunct. And it was very easy to get set up. In that case, it was very, very simple in the educational world because our problem was you bring 30, 40 people into a class, and you'd spend the entire class trying to get everybody's tidy purse installed in the same way, trying to say, well, where can I locate this file on my desktop? So giving people access to a specific state of an environment for something like the RStudio IDE or Jupyter Notebook really simplified that flow.

And I think it works the same way on the data professional side. So if you have a team of three or four people that are coming in, and they're sharing projects with each other, or they're putting outputs in one space, it simplifies all that, and it gives you some added continuity in terms of people coming on and off your team to operate within those environments. I think, finally, like anything else, when you start doing real work in a tool, you pick up what does work for you and what doesn't work for you well. So I think if you've never been in it and you're familiar with RStudio, let's say, you'll feel pretty comfortable coding in RStudio right away. And the bells and whistles around it in terms of the management of either people or capacity for compute, that'll take a little bit of learning. There is a comprehensive guide that we can share a link to where you can go through and read top to bottom some of those elements that I talked about today to get you up to speed faster. But I really think it takes a few moments of failing before you're going to get really comfortable with the tool.

So I know you covered a little bit about templates, but someone had asked, are there pre-built templates in PositCloud? Yeah, let me go ahead and just switch my screen and then share that. Yeah, so this was added, I believe, a week and a half ago, maybe two weeks ago. But if I get back into PositCloud and I'm going to go to my workspace. So this is the simple personal workspace. In this space, you can't create new ones, new custom templates that you can reuse, but you can use the ones that Posit put together. So if I click on new project from template, you can see all of the available templates that authors around Posit have put together.

And there's really two purposes for this. The first one is, as we saw in some of the examples today, when you start a new project from scratch, you need to install all of these packages to get a lot of the work done that you're going to get done. And if you know already, you're just looking to do some basic analysis with pandas or on the Python side, or with the Tinyverse on the R side, you can click it, you can know what you need is going to be there. So it speeds up that process for you for kind of quick and dirty analysis. The other benefit to it is you might notice from this screen, if you're a first time user, it's a pretty blank environment, right? So we're giving you the tools to do whatever you want, but it might be hard to know where to start. So what's great about the new template feature, if I click on data analysis in R or the Tinyverse, and I click OK, this is going to deploy the project for me. It's going to have a readme file that's going to describe what files are already in here, what sample data might you have. It's going to have all of the libraries already configured and pre-installed to support the demo files that are in here.

So let's see when this opens up. Here we go. You can see we have a readme file, which will talk through a little bit about the data set that's going to be used. It's going to talk through the files that are already included. But more impressively, when you click on languages, and this is a flow created by Sarah on our team here, you're going to see that this is already calling in the library, it's going out to some specific data included in this template, and it's doing basic exploratory analysis. If I change this to preview in the viewer pane, without me having to install Tinyverse, without me having to install anything related to Quarto, I should just be able to render this, and it's going to take the 21 chunks that are in the analysis code. And you can see right away we have this Quarto HTML report that goes out to that raw data, uses Tinyverse functions to sort of synthesize it and help you understand the basics of data analysis.

So those two purposes are what you can use it for, to speed up your workflows, like you just need Tinyverse right now, you don't feel like creating your own custom template, click it, start using it. Two, for people who maybe are not so familiar or don't know where to get started or just want to test the feel and the look of doing this type of work in Positive Cloud, they can get in here with some real data, some real scripts, and start playing around.

That's great. So we've got another question. Someone said, it seems interesting, but I'm just wondering why use Jupyter Notebook via R Posit? How fast is it compared to only using the Jupyter IDE? Yeah, I think it depends on where you're doing your work, right? So if you're doing Jupyter Notebooks on your local machine, that's probably one way to do it. Of course, when you go that route, you need to set it up in a different way. So if you're that route, you need to set it up by yourself. You need to get it to work. What our belief is, is that over time, people are more inclined to work in these cloud environments, depending on the type of work that they're doing, right? It's not going to be for everyone in every situation, but I think the value proposition is ultimately you're able to log in to your web browser, pull up a variety of IDEs. Right now, it's just RStudio IDE and Jupyter Notebook, but in the future, there likely will be more. Publish things from that work or from your desktop into PositCloud, and then use PositCloud as this environment that can really handle a variety of different coding languages that can host a variety of applications and documents.

I think having it in that unified space, in an easy to use, flexible environment, makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. So I think that the three terms we think of with PositCloud are it is convenient, right? You hop onto your browser, you log in, you start doing work. It is simple. Everything is kind of in this one unified environment. You can gate things into a space and have really like containerized style work in that environment, like for the client that we look through the workflow for today. And the final is flexible. So this is a freemium product. You can experiment with a lot of this functionality completely for free. We've added on new pricing models for professionals this year at $25 a month and $75 a month, where you get different specs and a different number of compute specs and different number of compute hours associated with the plans. But a very simple environment to go check out and see if this does work for you, to see if it is as performant. And if not, you turn it off next month and there's no major commitment on your end either.

So I think that the three terms we think of with PositCloud are it is convenient, right? You hop onto your browser, you log in, you start doing work. It is simple. Everything is kind of in this one unified environment. And the final is flexible.

So the next two questions are similar and they have to do with safety and PositCloud. So someone asked, how safe is it in terms of data confidentiality and protection? And then the second related question is how private safe is the data on PositCloud? Yeah, great question. And this is one of the elements that we're going to look into a lot more closely as we add more functionality to the tool and we expand into more kind of professional use cases. Let me start by sharing a link or I'll show the page first. So we've added in the last two or three months, a new sub page that talks about security specifically. We are doing all the architecture on AWS. We follow a certain set of best practices related to cloud computing there. So this page can talk you through just what we do today on authentication and encryption and security, how collaboration works, and how we can help you understand how collaboration works and what our application security looks like. So this is a starting point.

And the reason that we put it up here is for people who are evaluating the tool to say, is this sufficient for my needs? We talk to people in finance and pharmaceuticals quite a lot. For a lot of their work right now, these security specs don't match their needs for what they're doing in terms of legally what they're able to do within a tool. For others, it is a completely valid way for them to conduct their analysis in one unified space where they're able to get people from around their organization to start contributing.

I will say that as we are going to start paying even more attention to our security footprint, we're going to be working through something called the cloud control matrix, which will hopefully put us in line to get some of those additional badges that you might hear on the security front. And we think that each wave of iteration on the security front will bring in a wider array of organizations who are able to technically, legally, to get into PositCloud and start doing their work there.

Awesome. The last question that I see right now, and you may have mentioned this, but does PositCloud support VS Code? Also a great question. And that's one of the features that you would find in Workbench, right, where you can have JupyterLab or VS Code or Jupyter Notebook. At the moment, PositCloud does not. We are definitely planning on our roadmap is bringing in some of these more sophisticated Python tools to make that experience more balanced between our coders and Python coders.

Awesome. Well, I think that might be all of the questions that we're going to have today. So thank you, Alex, and thank you everyone for tuning in today, submitting your questions. I'll just make a note that we're hosting these events every month on the last Tuesday of the month. So next month, we'll have another PositCloud Essentials event. You can view all of these past events on YouTube within a playlist that is linked in the description section of this event. Also, you can add the upcoming events to your calendar using a link in the description of this YouTube event. So thank you, Alex. Thank you all for joining, and we'll see you next month. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Hannah. Thanks.