Amazon has added the RStudio development environment for the R language to its SageMaker machine learning service, claiming it as the first integrated development environment (IDE) in the cloud for data scientists working on machine learning with R.

The open source R language has long been a tool of choice for statisticians, quantitative analysts, data scientists, and machine learning engineers, according to Amazon. RStudio is one of the most popular development environments among R developers for machine learning and data science projects.

Now, in partnership with RStudio developers RStudio PBC, Amazon has made available RStudio as a fully managed integrated development environment within Amazon SageMaker and hosted on AWS. The integration allows users to launch an RStudio environment in their SageMaker Domain and run RStudio workflows using SageMaker resources.

RStudio on Amazon SageMaker makes it easy for data scientists to run statistical analysis, build machine learning models, and create data science content for their team on a centralised environment without worrying about the compute infrastructure, Amazon said.

In order to use RStudio on Amazon SageMaker, users need an administrator to procure licenses from RStudio PBC, then set up the licenses in AWS License Manager and create an Amazon SageMaker domain and user profiles. However, existing RStudio users can reuse their current licenses and migrating any self-managed RStudio environments to SageMaker is a simple process, according to Amazon.

Once deployed, developers will be able to use the familiar RStudio IDE interface with popular developer tools from the R ecosystem, including the RStudio Package Manager, and publish Shiny apps using RStudio Connect.

RStudio on Amazon SageMaker is available in all AWS Regions where both Amazon SageMaker Studio and AWS License Manager are available. As well as licenses, customers need to pay for the underlying compute and storage resources within Amazon SageMaker or other AWS services, based on usage. However, users can get started with RStudio on Amazon SageMaker using the AWS Free Tier.