Installing the R Server is motivated by a wechat article 搭建你的免费R云端服务器. It uses the Machine Learning Server which recently becomes free to the public by Microsoft. The installation of Machine Learning Server refers the official documentation. And I install it on my AWS server. Since I only have access to Ubuntu14.04 and Ubuntu18.04, I choose to install it on the 14.04 version.
Step 1
Launch the instance of Ubuntu 14.04 in AWS account. By the way, students could apply for AWS Educate for computing resources.
Step 2
Sign in as a Microsoft Developer and thus could have access to dev essential resources. Then follow the instruction on Microsoft Official Doc about Ubuntu:
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# Install as root
sudo su
# Optionally, if your system does not have the https apt transport option
apt-get install apt-transport-https
# Add the **azure-cli** repo to your apt sources list
AZ_REPO=$(lsb_release -cs)
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/azure-cli/ $AZ_REPO main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azure-cli.list
# Set the location of the package repo the "prod" directory containing the distribution.
# This example specifies 16.04. Replace with 14.04 if you want that version
wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb
# Register the repo
dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
# Verify whether the "microsoft-prod.list" configuration file exists
ls -la /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
# Add the Microsoft public signing key for Secure APT
apt-key adv --keyserver packages.microsoft.com --recv-keys 52E16F86FEE04B979B07E28DB02C46DF417A0893
# Update packages on your system
apt-get update
# Install the server
apt-get install microsoft-mlserver-all-9.3.0
# Activate the server
/opt/microsoft/mlserver/9.3.0/bin/R/activate.sh
# List installed packages as a verification step
apt list --installed | grep microsoft
# Choose a package name and obtain verbose version information
dpkg --status microsoft-mlserver-packages-r-9.3.0
However, error messages come out when installing the server. It could due to the AWS, but I haven’t figured that out yet. Then, I tried to install the server on the Red Hat system refering to the Official Doc. But it still failed. The error showed that there was not enough disk memory for it.