Abstraction of user storage mechanisms for heterogeneous REANA scientific pipelines.

REANA is an open-source reusable research data analysis platform, that allows researchers to run their analyses in remote compute clouds. The analyses use containerised environments and rely on declarative computational workflow specifications. The workflows use remote workspaces to share input/output and temporary files between workflow jobs during workflow execution.

The goal of this project is to abstract the concept of the workspace in the REANA platform, in order to allow the usage of various storage backends at the same time .This will allow the REANA administrators the flexibility to deploy clusters with several authorised workspace locations, as well as allow users to choose the desired workspace location for each particular workflow run.

The present work allows the integration of any POSIX-based filesystem storage solution and paves the way towards using object-based file storage solutions in the future.