See also: ‣
See also: Re-startable public sessions for demonstrators (Apps/Dashboards)
When people ask about “Apps” on renku, they often refer to that they want to apps to run indefinitely and have fast access (i.e. be running when the viewer goes to access). However, I don’t think any service out there that provides this sort of thing has apps running forever; think huggingface or shiny server - they are always spun up on-demand, kept for a while, and torn down.
We can easily create a long-running session by offering a resource pool with a long culling time. But that will result in lots of long running sessions that waste compute resources. We can address this by making each long-running “app” public, so that at least we only run 1 long-running app session per project, regardless of how many people connect to it.
Thus, it's helpful to decouple the "how to access" and the "how long it lives". This pitch focuses only on the “how to access” question (and assumes for now that “how long it lives” can be solved with a resource class with a long culling time, and later Re-startable public sessions for demonstrators (Apps/Dashboards) ).
With “how to access” it’s basically a question of setting permissions on the resulting session. Adding the ability to make a session publicly accessible would be a useful increment towards “apps” as the Academic Team wants them.
I could imagine a user flow like this: