Genomics in the Cloud

Chapter 13. Assembling Your Own Workspace in Terra

In Chapters 11 and 12, you learned how  to use workflows and interactive notebooks in Terra using prebaked workspaces. Now, it’s time for you to learn to bake your own so you can build your own analyses within the Terra framework. This is an area provides a lot of options and multiple valid approaches, so rather than attempting to provide a one-size-fits-all path, we’re going to walk through three scenarios.

In the first scenario, we re-create the book tutorial workspace from its base components to demonstrate the key mechanisms involved in assembling a workspace from the ground up. In the second and third scenarios, we show you how to take advantage of existing workspaces to minimize the amount of work you have to do when starting a new project. In one case, we explain how to add data to an existing workspace that is already set up for a particular analysis, such as the official GATK Best Practices workspaces. In the other, we demonstrate how to build an analysis around data exported from the Terra Data Library. However, before we dive into those three scenarios, let’s explore the data management strategy that we’re applying in all three cases.

Managing Data Inside and Outside of Workspaces

One of the most important aspects of moving your work to the cloud is designing a data management strategy that will be sustainable for the long term, especially if you expect to work with large datasets that will serve as input for multiple ...