Laniakea: an open solution to provide Galaxy “on-demand” instances over heterogeneous cloud infrastructures

Abstract

Background

While the popular workflow manager Galaxy is currently made available through several publicly accessible servers, there are scenarios where users can be better served by full administrative control over a private Galaxy instance, including, but not limited to, concerns about data privacy, customisation needs, prioritisation of particular job types, tools development, and training activities. In such cases, a cloud-based Galaxy virtual instance represents an alternative that equips the user with complete control over the Galaxy instance itself without the burden of the hardware and software infrastructure involved in running and maintaining a Galaxy server.

Results

We present Laniakea, a complete software solution to set up a “Galaxy on-demand” platform as a service. Building on the INDIGO-DataCloud software stack, Laniakea can be deployed over common cloud architectures usually supported both by public and private e-infrastructures. The user interacts with a Laniakea-based service through a simple front-end that allows a general setup of a Galaxy instance, and then Laniakea takes care of the automatic deployment of the virtual hardware and the software components. At the end of the process, the user gains access with full administrative privileges to a private, production-grade, fully customisable, Galaxy virtual instance and to the underlying virtual machine (VM). Laniakea features deployment of single-server or cluster-backed Galaxy instances, sharing of reference data across multiple instances, data volume encryption, and support for VM image-based, Docker-based, and Ansible recipe-based Galaxy deployments. A Laniakea-based Galaxy on-demand service, named Laniakea@ReCaS, is currently hosted at the ELIXIR-IT ReCaS cloud facility.

Conclusions

Laniakea offers to scientific e-infrastructures a complete and easy-to-use software solution to provide a Galaxy on-demand service to their users. Laniakea-based cloud services will help in making Galaxy more accessible to a broader user base by removing most of the burdens involved in deploying and running a Galaxy service. In turn, this will facilitate the adoption of Galaxy in scenarios where classic public instances do not represent an optimal solution. Finally, the implementation of Laniakea can be easily adapted and expanded to support different services and platforms beyond Galaxy.

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Now published in GigaScience doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giaa033

Marco Antonio Tangaro 1Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies, National Research Council (CNR), Via Amendola 165/A, 70126 Bari, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Marco Antonio TangaroGiacinto Donvito 2National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), Section of Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70126 Bari, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Giacinto DonvitoMarica Antonacci 2National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), Section of Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70126 Bari, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Marica AntonacciMatteo Chiara 3Department of Biosciences, University of Milan, via Celoria 26, 20133 Milano, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Matteo ChiaraPietro Mandreoli 3Department of Biosciences, University of Milan, via Celoria 26, 20133 Milano, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteGraziano Pesole 1Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies, National Research Council (CNR), Via Amendola 165/A, 70126 Bari, Italy4Department of Biosciences, Biotechnologies and Biopharmaceutics, University of Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70126 Bari, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Graziano PesoleFederico Zambelli 1Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies, National Research Council (CNR), Via Amendola 165/A, 70126 Bari, Italy3Department of Biosciences, University of Milan, via Celoria 26, 20133 Milano, ItalyFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Federico Zambelli

A version of this preprint has been published in the Open Access journal GigaScience (see paper https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giaa033 ), where the paper and peer reviews are published openly under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

These peer reviews were as follows:

Reviewer 1: http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/REVIEW.102183 Reviewer 2: http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/REVIEW.102184

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