The steps below can be followed to create a new AMI for use with Amazon EC2 instances that includes the latest versions of R, RStudio, and RStudio Server. The idea is inspired by the work of Louis Aslett, who creates and hosts his own public AMIs for RStudio. My own goal was to create an AMI with RStudio v1.0.0 or higher, such that I could use the recent R Notebooks feature. However, the instructions should generally apply for whenever you might be impatient accessing the latest version of R-related software on AWS (via an interactive browser interface...).
- Create a new EC2 instance with the latest Ubuntu AMI (should be fine to do with Spot); based on Louis Aslett's AMI, I opted to include a general purpose SSD EBS volume with 10GB of storage space
- SSH into the instance