→ Slides doi:10.7490/f1000research.1112589.1
→ Video
AuthorsEnis Afgan, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Nuwan Goonasekera, University of Melbourne, Australia
AbstractCloudLaunch started as BioCloudCentral.org, and provided a simple, intuitive way to launch Galaxy CloudMan on the Amazon cloud. The original idea has expanded over the years to accommodate launching of Virtual Machines for multiple applications, on various clouds, with additional configuration options. The Cloud Computing landscape has also evolved to facilitate deployment of complex applications, with increasing support for containers.
To adapt to these new realities - we have rewritten CloudLaunch from the ground up as a general purpose application launch platform, targeting multiple applications, clouds and containers.
End users can use the new CloudLaunch as their cloud application deployment and management dashboard. From an app-store-like interface, cloud applications can be selected and launched from multiple clouds (Amazon, OpenStack and soon, GCE). Furthermore, users can view their live and shut-down instances from any supported cloud from this single location.
Technically, CloudLaunch has a fully-defined, documented and browsable ReST API, as well as an extensible web-based front-end for easy management. CloudLaunch’s UI allows each application to define its own custom UI, which can be dynamically plugged into CloudLaunch using simple descriptor metadata. This allows each application to present complex configuration options, allowing the application deployer an easy mechanism for providing launch-time configuration options.
This talk will present the new CloudLaunch features, from an end-user perspective as well as describe how developers and deployers can use it to define and deploy applications. Sample applications such as Galaxy on the Cloud, the Genomics Virtual Lab, a SLURM cluster, and RStudio will be showcased.
