Empowering Data Scientists with Zero Platform Friction: Deploying Streamlit & Friends in 3 Minutes

Bernhard Schäfer, Nicolas Renkamp

MLOps & DevOps
Python Skill Intermediate
Domain Expertise Intermediate

This session is for anyone who has built a Streamlit (or Dash, R Shiny, FastAPI, React) prototype and then hit the wall when it needed to be shared with real users: access to live data, SSO, permissioning, deployment, and operational guardrails.

We will present the workflow and the architecture from both sides: as a data scientist shipping an app, and as a platform admin operating the service safely at scale.

What we will demo

We will demo the end-to-end workflow from zero to a running app using our internal app service. The platform includes a web console for self-service provisioning and configuration and the deployment runtime managing the state of the application.

  • Using the web console to create and configure a new app from a framework template (Streamlit, Dash, R Shiny, FastAPI, React).
  • How a Git repository is created and the first version is deployed behind the scenes, including a working starter app with example pages.

Key design decisions (the parts that are usually hard)

  • Identity propagation: the app receives the signed-in user identity from SSO and uses it for downstream authorization.
  • Authorization at the data layer: dataset permissions are scoped to use-case resource, making sure tokens can not be exploited.
  • Safe multi-tenancy: per-app isolation plus resource limits to prevent noisy-neighbor problems.
  • Repeatable delivery: templates plus CI/CD conventions so a new app starts from a working, deployable baseline.
  • Day-2 operations: guardrails like quotas, rate limiting, and idle shutdown to keep the platform reliable and cheap.

Running at scale

  • Production usage: 750+ active apps and 8k+ unique end users (2025).
  • Infrastructure run rate under 10k USD per month (excluding engineering time).

Who should attend

  • Data scientists and analysts who want to ship apps beyond a demo.
  • Data platform and DevOps engineers building self-service tooling for governed environments.
  • Teams standardizing how internal data & AI products are delivered to business users.

Takeaways

  • For data scientists: what a good internal app hosting platform should provide, and which requirements you should ask your platform team for (governed on-behalf of data access, templates, CI/CD, guardrails).
  • For platform teams: a blueprint you can adapt beyond AWS, including the architecture and tradeoffs necessary to operate fine-grained authorization and a multi-tenant runtime at scale.

If you do not have such an app platform in your company yet, use this talk as a checklist to start the conversation with your IT or platform teams. :-)

Bernhard Schäfer

Bernhard is a Senior Data Scientist at Merck with a PhD in deep learning and over 7 years of experience in applying data science and data engineering within different industries. For more information you can connect with him on LinkedIn. 🙂

Nicolas Renkamp

As the Global Head of Platform Products Portfolio, Nicolas leads high performing teams that design, implement and maintain Merck's global data, analytics and AI ecosystem UPTIMIZE.