Advantage
Creation of a reproducible, centralized development environment for R and Python.
Challenge
Decentralized data science initiatives in an international group without a common standardized development environment.
Toolset
RStudio products, Kubernetes, IAM, Terraform, Ansible
Challenge
The leading German polymer materials manufacturer Covestro is driving digitalization and numerous associated initiatives in the field of data science and AI. To drive these forward, a common standardized development environment was lacking. At an internationally active group like Covestro, the topic of data science is driven forward in a decentralized manner in different areas and teams.
This makes development work more difficult and leads to high administrative costs and compliance problems. In addition, different environments presented the data scientists with challenges, as internal compatibility of the development products could not be guaranteed.
Goal
Covestro wants to provide its data scientists with a centralized development environment for R and Python developments in order to reduce their administrative workload and promote productive work. The new analysis infrastructure should also be scalable and reproducible.
Solution
As part of eoda | analytic infrastructure consulting, eoda supports Covestro from outlining the architecture (see below), through implementation, to the ongoing operation of the analysis environment.
RStudio products are at the center of the infrastructure as selected tools. These include RStudio Workbench for development, RStudio Connect for sharing and deploying applications and RStudio Package Manager for package management. Furthermore, a Kubernetes backend is used to outsource the computing processes in order to ensure horizontal scaling. The new analysis environment is integrated into the existing AWS infrastructure at Covestro.
In addition, the existing management tools, such as Identity Access Management (IAM), continue to form a central management instance in the company without the new environment generating high additional costs. As part of the required reproducibility, the infrastructure was scripted using Terraform and Ansible. This infrastructure-as-code approach ensures that the setup and configuration of the environment is comprehensible and can be implemented quickly.
Result
With the help of eoda, a reproducible, centralized development environment for R and Python was created. In addition to making it easier to meet compliance guidelines, the central analysis environment ensures more efficient collaboration in the context of Covestro's decentralized working model.
Image source: Covestro AG
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We look forward to exchanging ideas with you.
Your expert on Data-Infrastructures:
Ricarda Kretschmer
infrastructure@eoda.de
Tel. +49 561 87948-370
