Executives in the industry sometimes ask me if we are moving our software to the “cloud”. When I say we are already a cloud, then they wonder: “then what is Amazon offering?”
Its helpful to think of the cloud as a layered architecture. The VC Bessemer provides a nice definition of this layering.
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- Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Web-services applications framework for provisioning computers, networks, and storage resources without regard to the actual hardware topology. Examples of IaaS are Amazon EC2 and SGI
- Platform-as-a-Service: Web-services application framework for provisioning data, algorithm, and analysis services and developing new applications. Leveraging all the benefits of the IaaS layer, the GenomeQuest Developer API Framework provides services for managing, comparing, and mining sequence databases without regard to the underlying computers and storage.
- Software-as-a-Service: A finished Web-appliction end-to-end solution for a given end-user application. Examples of this in the Life Science space include the Ingenuity IPA product and the GenomeQuest 6.3 SDM platform.
To my knowledge, we have the industry’s only cloud-based “PaaS”. With a few commands from a remote desktop, developers can upload data, apply algorithms on hundreds of cores while accessing terabytes of well managed sequence data. In the future, we intend to leverage the extraordinary economies of scale offered by IaaS providers such as Amazon.
If you’re curious about the API’s, take a look here.
