Examples Of Paas And Saas In Bioinformatics

Question

[User 6659]

Hello

I was wondering if anyone could offer some examples as software as a service and platform as a service in bioinformatics. I am aware examples of data as a service and hardware as a service but I don't know many specific examples of SaaS and PaaS.

I have already seen this question here and read the suggested links and papers. Perhaps I'm getting my definitions muddled up but most of the examples of cloud computing i have seen are people trying out their own applications on the cloud (e.g. CloudBurst and CloudBlast). That's not software as a service. is any software made available to me as a service (whether it runs on the cloud or not) classed as SaaS such as all the blast servers etc.

PaaS is more obscure. I am not aware of anything like Microsoft Azure (an eg of PaaS) for bioinformatics. I know people are making bioinformatics machine images available but that's not really PaaS is it? Isn't PaaS more about tools that allow you to produce and deploy applications quickly without the hassle of setting up servers/databases etc?

How would you classify Galaxy's CloudMan? That's a toolkit for making it easier to deploy instances on the cloud so its not really 'anything' as a service is it? It's a cloud admin tool?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

[Enis Afgan]

I can talk specifically about Galaxy's CloudMan and say that it gets pretty close to being a PaaS and SaaS in one. On the surface, it makes access to cloud computing resources easily available and allows one to control the same. In a few minutes, a completely configured and setup bioinformatics workbench becomes available. This is, of course, achieved through Galaxy, while CloudMan takes care of setting up and managing the underlying resources. This acts as the SaaS component you mentioned.

Now, because Galaxy itself is pluggable and CloudMan is modular, one can extend the default functionality offered. More specifically, it is possible to add additional tools or reference genomes within Galaxy while having it under complete control through CloudMan. This gets pretty close to the PaaS component because all of the low- and mid-level components are handled and provided by the two packages while giving one a possibility to extend it or customize it.

Hope this helps.