Online use of QIIME 2?

Dear all,
due to changes related to IT security, I currently cannot work under linux or a macOS. A private linux PC is not an option for me either. I actually don’t want to discuss the IT security thing here. To make a long story short: I only have a Windows PC and working with a virtual machine is also not an option due to IT security issues.
Is anyone aware of a pure online option (e.g. a server that I can access simply from my browser, an online version of the linux / macOS terminal, …) under which I can run QIIME 2?
Thanks in advance,
Lukas

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Hi @lukasbeule,

I can come up with four options for you, depending on your project size and additional security concerns.

  1. You could try an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance. This would let you access your work from a browser, but would mean hosting your data remotely in the cloud. This costs money; I'm not sure about the status of project grants. I would double check the ethical implications of this as well; your ethics board may not allow you to do this.

  2. Look into regional or national compute infrastructure. I've worked in the US and Europe, and in both places, we've been able to buy time on a departmental/institutional/state/national super computing resource. This may be more power than you need. Typically, these computers have better GDPR assurances if you're working with sensitive data (for example, our Swedish resource has a dedicated system for genetic data.) This would require something like a PUTTY interface to access.

  3. It looks like qiime2 has moved into galaxy (q2Galaxy - Galaxy Community Hub). I haven't been involved, so I'm personally sure about the status; some other moderator may be able to tell you more. I also don't know what this means about your data, if there is a local concern

  4. Qiita offers some analysis capabilities, depending on what you're doing. Your data would be hosted at UCSD and the team at UCSD would be able to see your metadata. There may also be a time limit during which your data can be kept private, although its been a while since I worked directly with Qiita. You are also limited to the annotation methods/database/visualization in the database.

You are far more patient than I am.

Best,
Justine

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Hi @jwdebelius,
thank you for listing the different options :slightly_smiling_face:
We will check which option works best for us.
Cheers,
Lukas

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Hi @lukasbeule,

The perpetually brilliant @SoilRotifer just pointed out that you might also be able to access QIIME via cyverse.

Best,
Justine

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Hi again @jwdebelius and @SoilRotifer!
thank you very much for mentioning CyVerse! This looks exactly like what I was searching for. First of all, thank you @Alyssa_Cochran1 for making this possible :slightly_smiling_face: I wonder though whether QIIME 2 via CyVerse is being updated regulary and whether I can use additional plugins from the q2 library?
Cheers,
Lukas

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Hi Lukas,

Is Google Colab an option? Take a look at this colab. There I am installing QIIME 2 with the code provided here (version 2021.8, but I guess it's not difficult to replace this by whatever you want). I also install q2-srs to show you can install other plugins from the q2-library.

Hope this helps,
Vitor

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