Deploying Posit Team on Kubernetes with Helm

Why This Exists

Data science teams need infrastructure. They need RStudio, they need a way to publish reports and APIs, and they need a package manager that doesn’t break every Monday. Posit Team (formerly RStudio Team) provides all of this — but deploying it on Kubernetes isn’t straightforward.

There was no official Helm chart that deployed the full suite together with sensible defaults. So I built one.

What It Deploys

The Helm chart sets up the complete Posit Team stack:

• Posit Workbench (RStudio IDE) — The development environment for R and Python
• Posit Connect — Publishing platform for Shiny apps, R Markdown reports, APIs, and dashboards
• Posit Package Manager — Local CRAN/PyPI mirror for reproducible environments

Key Features

# values.yaml (simplified)
workbench:
  replicas: 1
  resources:
    limits:
      memory: "4Gi"
      cpu: "2"
  persistence:
    size: 50Gi

connect:
  replicas: 2
  ingress:
    enabled: true
    host: connect.example.com

packageManager:
  persistence:
    size: 100Gi

The chart includes:

• Persistent storage — User home directories and published content survive pod restarts
• Authentication integration — LDAP, SAML, and OAuth2 support out of the box
• Resource limits — Configurable CPU/memory for each component
• Ingress routing — Expose services through your existing ingress controller
• Health checks — Liveness and readiness probes for all components

Architecture Decisions

• One chart, three services — Simpler to manage than three separate deployments with cross-dependencies
• Sensible defaults — Works out of the box for small teams, configurable for enterprise
• Storage-first design — Every stateful component has explicit PVC configuration

What I Learned

• Helm charts are deceptively complex — Templating logic for conditional resources, nested values, and cross-service dependencies requires careful design.
• Kubernetes for stateful workloads is a different game than stateless microservices. Persistent volumes, pod affinity, and graceful shutdown matter a lot.
• Documentation is the product — For infrastructure tools, clear docs with real examples are more important than clever code.

Try It

The chart is open source: posit-team-helm-k8s on GitHub