Laniakea@ReCaS: an ELIXIR-ITALY Galaxy on-demand cloud service

Although several Galaxy public services are available, a private Galaxy instance is still mandatory or preferable for several use cases including heavy workloads, data privacy concerns or particular customization needs: cloud computing technologies provide a solution to this, avoiding the onerous deployment and maintenance of a local IT infrastructure. In the last few years, ELIXIR-IT led the development of Laniakea [1-3], a software framework that facilitates the provisioning of on-demand Galaxy instances as a cloud service over e-infrastructures. The user interacts with a Laniakea service through a web front-end allowing to configure and launch a production grade Galaxy instance in a straightforward way. Through the interface, the user deploys Galaxy instances over single VMs or virtual clusters, links them to shared reference data volumes, and chooses between plain or encrypted volumes for storing data. A selection of “flavours”, that is Galaxy instances pre-configured with sets of tools for specific tasks, is available. Laniakea then deploys the desired Galaxy instance over the cloud, provides a public IP and full administrative privileges over the new instance. In Dec-2018 we launched the beta-test phase of the first Laniakea-based Galaxy on-demand ELIXIR-IT service: Laniakea@ReCaS. After six months of fruitful testing, we are now ready to announce the production phase of this service. Access to the service will be provided on a per-project basis through an open-ended call defining terms and conditions, project proposals will be evaluated by a scientific and technical board. Accepted proposals will be granted a package of computational resources for running on-demand Galaxy instances for a duration compatible with the project requirements. References [1] https://elixir-italy-laniakea.cloud.ba.infn.it [2] https://github.com/Laniakea-elixir-it [3] Tangaro et al. Laniakea: an open solution to provide Galaxy "on-demand" instances over heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/472464