On-demand virtual research environments using microservices

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2019 Nov 11:5:e232. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.232. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

The computational demands for scientific applications are continuously increasing. The emergence of cloud computing has enabled on-demand resource allocation. However, relying solely on infrastructure as a service does not achieve the degree of flexibility required by the scientific community. Here we present a microservice-oriented methodology, where scientific applications run in a distributed orchestration platform as software containers, referred to as on-demand, virtual research environments. The methodology is vendor agnostic and we provide an open source implementation that supports the major cloud providers, offering scalable management of scientific pipelines. We demonstrate applicability and scalability of our methodology in life science applications, but the methodology is general and can be applied to other scientific domains.

Keywords: Application containers; Cloud computing; Microservices; Orchestration; Virtual research environments.

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4204022

Grants and funding

This research was supported by The European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement number 654241 (PhenoMeNal) and the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) via the Glenna2 and Tryggve2 projects. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.