Discontinuing Cloud and R to fully focus on open-source data applications using Python

2020 has been one heck of a year. Despite the difficulties that came with the pandemic, we decided to start our journey with dstack and so far it has been a fantastic ride! In March, we started with a simple version of the product that allowed Python and R users to publish their data visualizations (made with matplotlib, plotly, bokeh, ggplot2, etc) and share with their peers. Following the feedback collected from our users, in August, we made a decision to open-source the core of the service and offer it as an alternative to our hosted solution.

Over the following months, we have also understood that Python and R users actually prefer to build interactive applications rather than share static visualizations. Unlike static visualizations that need to be published regularly to provide up-to-date information, interactive applications can be written once to use the latest data and ML models and provide up-to-date information when the user uses the application.

With time, it is imminent to us that we have to narrow our focus and drop things if we really want to create value for users where they need it most – interactive applications. Keeping this in mind, we announce that we plan to fully-focus on open-source and Python, and drop the R support and discontinue our cloud version.

We understand that this will affect all users of R and the cloud version. To make it easier to migrate, both R and the cloud version will continue to operate for the next 2 months, and then will be discontinued.

If you’re using the cloud version, we suggest that you either migrate to an alternative service or our open-source version . In case you’re using R and don’t plan to use Python, it’s most likely that you’ll have to migrate to another service. We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience caused by our decision and hope that you understand our motivation.

With the stated changes, our team will get a chance to fully focus on building interactive applications with dstack, and support the open-source community around it.

Once again we would like to thank everyone who shared their feedback with us or used dstack. You’ve made it possible for us to continue working on dstack.

Meanwhile, we are working hard on bringing interactive applications and hope to its first version by the end of this year. Within a couple of weeks, we plan to write a separate blog post with a glimpse of the design of the interactive applications.

In case you have any questions or would like to contribute to dstack, please reach out to us by writing to team@dstack.ai or writing in our Discord channel.

The dstack.ai team