Deploying An R Service To Azure Kubernetes Service

Hong Ooi shows us how we can use Azure Container Registry and Azure Kubernetes Service to deploy an R model via Plumber:

If you run this code, you should see a lot of output indicating that R is downloading, compiling and installing randomForest, and finally that the image is being pushed to Azure. (You will see this output even if your machine already has the randomForest package installed. This is because the package is being installed to the R session inside the container, which is distinct from the one running the code shown here.)
All docker calls in AzureContainers, like the one to build the image, return the actual docker commandline as the cmdline attribute of the (invisible) returned value. In this case, the commandline is docker build -t bos_rf . Similarly, the push() method actually involves two Docker calls, one to retag the image, and the second to do the actual pushing; the returned value in this case will be a 2-component list with the command lines being docker tag bos_rf deployreg.azurecr.io/bos_rf and docker push deployreg.azurecr.io/bos_rf.

I love this confluence of technologies and at the same time get a “descent into madness” feeling from the sheer number of worlds colliding.