I could use a bit of help in prepping for some upcoming conversations with the head of my company's IT/Security. I am trying to get IT support for Shiny (currently IT supports Tableau).
More specifically, I want to summarize the official document into about a 3-5 slide presentation.
Topics that I want to include:
What is Shiny? (3-5 bullet points, in language that a "traditional" IT person will understand)
How to think about security and authentication for both the free Shiny Server and Pro.
How to think about Dockerizing an application.
I attempted to summarize the official docs into a 3-5 slide PowerPoint (ugh, yes, PowerPoint!), but am really struggling. This is a massive document and I am not an IT person!
These are great questions. There are really three options for Shiny deployment -- RStudio Server Open Source, Shiny Server Pro, and RStudio Connect. RStudio Connect is a newer offering that includes the features of Shiny Server Pro and more.
You might want to check out the Shiny Gallery for some examples of real apps that might help you explain what Shiny is to IT folks.
Both Shiny Server Pro and RStudio Connect are built from the ground up to be enterprise platforms. That means they support industry standard authentication methods and security protocols. As all of our professional products are built around open source languages and tools, you could build any of this yourself if you wanted to, but many customers find that it's more secure and easier to buy a professional product with those features already integrated.
Being able to reproduce an app environment for deployment is a really important question. Docker is a tool that can help reproduce and deploy an app environment, but it's an incomplete answer. There are issues like reproducing an R package environment and updating that environment over time where Docker alone doesn't fully answer the question. I'd encourage you to check out environments.rstudio.com for some ideas on how to think more broadly about reproducible environments.
