Press "Enter" to skip to content

Controlling Azure Services In R With AzureR

Hong Ooi announces a new set of packages called AzureR:

As background, some of you may remember the AzureSMR package, which was written a few years back as an R interface to Azure. AzureSMR was very successful and gained a significant number of users, but it was never meant to be maintainable in the long term. As more features were added it became more unwieldy until its design limitations became impossible to ignore.

The AzureR family is a refactoring/rewrite of AzureSMR that aims to fix the earlier package’s shortcomings.

The core package of the family is AzureRMR, which provides a lightweight yet powerful interface to Azure Resource Manager. It handles authentication (including automatically renewing when a session token expires), managing resource groups, and working with individual resources and templates. It also calls the Resource Manager REST API directly, so you don’t need to have PowerShell or Python installed; it depends only on commonly used R packages like httr, jsonlite and R6.

This won’t replace the Powershell libraries, but looks like it’d be useful for scenarios like if you need to set up a VM, train a model, and then shut down the VM.