Challenges and opportunities of Amazon serverless lambda services in bioinformatics

Currently, several factors are moving biomedical research towards a (big) data-centred science. This yields new challenges for computer science solutions when dealing with bioinformatics applications. Among others, efficient storage, preprocessing, integration and analysis of omics and clinical data, result in a bottleneck on the analysis pipeline. This may be faced using cloud technology. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of deploying bioinformatics applications using the Amazon Serverless Lambda services. First experiments show that serverless computing is useful for this particular bioinformatics high-throughput application, because it simplifies resource management.