c'mon, they couldn't have named it the Amazon Genomics Toolkit CLI or something to get a T in there and then made the binary be named "agtc" instead of "agc"?
> the genomics and bioinformatics communities have developed specialized workflow definition languages like WDL, Nextflow, CWL, and Snakemake.<p>It's funny, but after many years in the field, and many generations of workflow definitions, I'm still now happy with any of the options. Snakemake is the closest to being usable for me for both prototyping and longer term work does, but they are all still fragile and inflexible in weird ways.<p>It's a tough problem to solve, which I think is evidenced by the large number of solutions. I've even tried looking outside at non-bioinformatics tools and never been very happy. And for all their flaws, the bioinformatics tools are better at typical bioinformatics workflows than tools developed for other domains.
It's nice to see cloud vendors starting to come to where the action is in standardised / open source tool sets rather than trying to capture people into their own proprietary workflow tools which has been a big turnoff for me thus far.<p>I'd be curious if the underpinnings of the support they have for these tools allows more toolsets to be brought over or if the integration is highly specialised.
Industry Espionage as a Service?<p>In my old university, the people working on the genome studies had to sign a draconian NDA and they had a dedicated air-gapped compute cluster for it. If your genomics study can produce a patent for a new diagnostic method or maybe even a drug precursor molecule, that'll be way more valuable than everything you spent on security.<p>And already 8 years ago, hacking attempts by what was thought of as foreign government actors was a common experience in life science research. When I had to give a talk about our methods, we scrambled all the gene IDs for fear of the slides getting leaked.<p>So based on how people working in that field behave, I presume they would never ever agree to upload the data to servers outside of their control. Accordingly, I can only imagine this service to be used accidentally by inexperienced students (who are then on the hook for violating their NDA).