Laniakea Shaping and Developing a Cloud-based bioinformatic platform

PhD Workshop 2021 UNIMI, 7-8 October

Galaxy is currently the prevailing workflow manager for bioinformatics thanks to its many useful features and a user-friendly interface. While several Galaxy public services are available to researchers, either for general purpose or dedicated to specific research domains, there are still many scenarios where a private Galaxy instance is necessary or preferable, including heavy data analysis workloads, data privacy concerns or specific customisation needs.

Cloud computing gives the possibility to the scientific community to have access to state-of-the-art computational resources without having to worry about hardware installation, configuration and maintenance. This characteristic is extremely useful in scientific fields, including life science, that deal with large amounts of data and need a lot of computational and storage resources to analyse them. Cloud computing technology is a promising solution to this problem allowing small laboratories and even large institutions to have access to adequate IT resources without the need of establishing and maintaining complex and expensive computational infrastructures.

Laniakea is a software framework that facilitates the provisioning of on-demand Galaxy instances as a cloud service over e-infrastructures, by leveraging the open-source software platform developed by the INDIGO-DataCloud H2020 project, which aimed to make cloud e-infrastructures more accessible by scientific communities.

End-users interact with Laniakea through a web front-end allowing a general setup of a Galaxy instance. The deployment of the virtual hardware and of the Galaxy software ecosystem is subsequently performed by the INDIGO Platform as a Service layer. At the end of the process, the user gains access to a private, production-grade,fully customisable, Galaxy virtual instance.