Laniakea@ReCaS: first year of activity of a Laniakea-based Galaxy “on-demand” service

Cloud technologies offer, among other advantages, the possibility to provide to users ad hoc configured virtual servers. For example, Galaxy instances to those users that need full administrative control over a private-instance due to different scenarios, e.g concerns about data privacy, particular job types, intensive computational loads, and tools development. Recently we developed Laniakea, a Galaxy “on-demand” software platform based on cloud technology that allows its users to easily deploy and become the owners and administrators of production-grade Galaxy instances. In February 2020 “Laniakea@ReCaS”, the first Laniakea-based service, was officially launched by ELIXIR-IT. We provide an overview of the first year of activity of “Laniakea@ReCaS”, focusing on several use-cases that leveraged the service to achieve results that would have been more difficult, or impossible, for the users to achieve relying on standard public Galaxy instances. During its first year, “Laniakea@ReCaS” has supported the daily work of several groups from different institutions across a range of applications and activities. Aside from handling the use-cases data analysis needs in terms of resources and tools, “Laniakea@ReCaS” has proved to be an interesting platform to quickly develop and make available novel Galaxy based services. As proof of this, during the first year of the service activity three Galaxy servers specific for different pipelines have been developed and made public: VINYL a novel software suite for variant prioritization, CorGAT a pipeline for the functional annotation of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and Pipe-T, a workflow for the analysis of RT-qPCR data.