What is dstack?
dstack.ai is an open-source tool and an enterprise platform for building data and ML applications using Python and R.
How is dstack different from other frameworks (Shiny, Dash, Streamlit, and others):
It is designed for data scientists and doesn't require development skills to build applications.
It simplifies the process of creating applications by leveraging
a) a declarative approach to defining application components;
b) agnostic to data science frameworks and tools.
How dstack works
The framework consists of the following parts:
A server application (dstack-server). It handles the requests from the Client packages, and serve data applications. The application can run locally or in Docker.
A data science application is a specific kind of application that solves domain-specific problems using data and data science methods. These data science methods may include data-wrangling, data visualizations, statistical modeling, machine learning, etc.
Building data science applications
There are several general use-cases for such data science applications:
Interactive reports – a set data visualizations and interactive widgets, combined using a certain layout
Live dashboards – applications that fetch data from various data sources, turn it into visualizations and combine using a certain layout (not supported yet)
Machine learning applications – applications that let users interact with ML models (not supported yet)
Currently, dstack supports only Interactive reports. The support for Live dashboards and Machine learning applications is coming soon.
Check out this quick tutorial on how to build interactive reports with dstack in minutes.
Automating scientific routines
The dstack in-cloud and on-premises versions allow you to execute Python and R jobs right – either on demand or automatically at a regular schedule.
The jobs are ideal for processing data regularly and publishing the results, e.g. in the form of data visualizations, datasets, or other artifacts.
