Abstract
Background Galaxy is rapidly becoming a de facto standard among workflow managers for bioinformatics thanks to its rich feature set, overall flexibility, and a thriving community. One of the main advantages of Galaxy consists in making complex analyses, e.g. involving numerous and large data sets, accessible even to users lacking computer proficiency, while at the same time improving results reproducibility and easing teamwork and data sharing among researchers. Currently, many Galaxy public services are available but there still exist situations in which a private Galaxy instance constitutes a preferable alternative, for example, scenarios involving heavy workloads, data privacy concerns or particular instance customization needs. In those cases, a virtual Galaxy instance can represent a viable solution that avoids the typical burdens of managing the local hardware and software infrastructure needed to run and maintain a production-grade Galaxy service.
Results We present a robust and feature-rich software suite called Laniakea, ready to be deployed on any scientific or commercial Cloud infrastructure in order to provide a “Galaxy on demand” Platform as a Service (PaaS). Laniakea lays its foundations on the INDIGO-DataCloud middleware that has been developed targeting a large number of scientific communities and is therefore deployable on multiple hardware and provisioned over hybrid (private or public) e-infrastructures. The end user interacts with Laniakea through a front-end that allows a general setup of the Galaxy instance, then Laniakea takes charge of the deployment both of the virtual hardware and of all the software components, finally providing a production-grade, but still fully customizable, Galaxy virtual instance. Laniakea’s many features include support to the deployment of plain or cluster backed Galaxy instances, shared reference data volumes, encrypted user data volumes and rapid development of novel Galaxy flavours, that is Galaxy configurations tailored for specific tasks, through Ansible recipes. As a proof of concept, we provide a demo Laniakea instance hosted at an ELIXIR-IT Cloud facility.
Conclusions The migration of scientific computational services towards virtualization and e-infrastructures is one of the most visible trends of our times. Laniakea provides Cloud administrators with a ready-to-use software suite that enables them to offer Galaxy, a popular workflow manager for bioinformatics, as an on-demand PaaS. We think that Laniakea can concur in making the many advantages of using Galaxy more accessible to a wider user base by removing most of the burdens involved in running a private instance. Furthermore, Laniakea’s design has been imprinted to generality and modularity and could, therefore, be easily adapted to support different services and platforms beyond Galaxy.