Virtual useR! 2024

The use of containers across organizations and their GxP R environments is quite common. The rationale could differ from providing isolated project specific R compute environments based on a standard validated container or it is simply a cheap and easily accessible virtual environment in a pre-existing IT architecture. In most circumstances, this approach relies on maintaining different frozen validated container images, sometimes referred to as golden images, for each particular use case. If instead we utilize container image provenance and some very simple controls in our validation strategy, we could create one validated container image that is then used as the basis for any container images designed for particular use cases. We consider how the approach impacts and, in many ways, simplifies the four classic use cases of Posit Workbench for interactive development, {shiny} for apps, {plumber} for APIs, and a back-end compute environment for batch processing.