[ome-devel] OMERO on AWS

[Douglas Russell]

The simple answer is yes, we have run OMERO on AWS.

The complex answer though is that what it means to "Use the cloud" is
somewhat ambiguous. My personal definition is that it makes use of cloud
technologies such as elastic compute scaling and object storage. OMERO at
this time can not make use of that.

If you want to fire up a server (of whatever EC2 size) in AWS and attach it
to either Elastic Block Storage (EBS) or Elastic File System (EFS), then
you can certainly do that without any problems whatsoever. It does buy you
some nice things over a local piece of hardware, such as that you could
start with the smallest EC2 instance and migrate to a larger one later
easily. Also, you only pay for the EBS/EFS you are actually using instead
of potentially having a large amount of local disk reserved and unused and
it can scale up as you fill it up. I feel there are some disadvantages as
well though, such as that you have to send all the data to the cloud in the
first place and if you have local compute resources, then it would have to
come back from the cloud to make use of them. This can end up being
expensive.

Long term, I would like to see OMERO be able to make use of object storage,
elastic compute scaling and other cloud technologies which would mean that
the value of having your OMERO server "in the cloud" would be greatly
enhanced.

We (HMS, OHSU, Glencoe Software and a few others) are about to embark on a
1-year pilot project funded by the NIH as a BD2K supplement to our LINCS
grant. One of the objectives is to start work on scaling OMERO horizontally
which is somewhat of a prerequisite of being able to take advantage of
scaled cloud resources. We are also planning to leverage that and develop
cloud-based OMERO archives for cost-effective, long-term data sharing, but
we haven't actually begun the project yet so there are few concrete details
at this point.

Cheers,

Douglas


On Mon, 26 Sep 2016 at 14:01 Anthony, Neil <nantho2 at emory.edu> wrote:

> Hi all,
> Can I please ask if anybody has manged to get OMERO running from AWS?  I
> saw a few fourm posts that it might be an option, and wondered what the
> status was in that direction.  I imagine everybody will be going cloud
> based before too long and I'm thinking about the options.
>
> Thanks
> Neil
>
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