What is the GA4GH Reference Cloud?
The Reference Cloud is a reference implementation of multiple GA4GH standards, co-developed by the GA4GH staff technical team as well as the wider GA4GH contributor community.
The purpose of the Reference Cloud is to:
- Provide a live model of GA4GH standards in action, demonstrating how they work as running applications rather than just technical specifications
- Clarify the touchpoints between GA4GH standards, demonstrating how they may be used in concert to accomplish end-to-end genomics workflows
- Enable and particpate in novel applications of GA4GH standards, including federated analysis
- Provide a starting codebase for implementers looking to adopt GA4GH in their own workflows, but are unsure of where to begin
Overall, the reference cloud acts as a helpful resource for those in the GA4GH community, functioning as both a teaching tool and a scaffold for demos and analytical workflows.
The GA4GH technical team maintains a live production instance at https://refcloud.ga4gh.org. We encourage you to register a user account on the platform and follow along with the various interactive demos provided in these docs. In addition, as the codebase is completely open source, members of the community are welcome to run their own instances of the reference cloud on their own infrastructure, and make modifications to the underlying code as needed.
Which GA4GH standards have been implemented in the reference cloud?
| Specification | Version | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Passport | 1.0 | Implemented |
| Data Repository Service (DRS) | 1.5 | Implemented |
So far, only the Passports and DRS standards have been implemented in the reference cloud. However, we plan to implement many more standards across all work streams in the near future.
Next Steps
In the next article, we'll go over how to register and login to the platform.