Choosing your environment
=========================

Local
-----

Run RAFT locally when:

- you want to run directly from a workstation, server, or compute cluster
- you want the simplest installation and debugging loop

RAFT can run locally whether you are running on a single machine or on a cluster
with a job scheduler such as SLURM. Users should ensure an appropriate profile
for their compute environment is available in their ``~/.nextflow/config``
file.  RAFT provides a minimal default profile upon installation.

.. note::
   Users can specify which Nextflow profile to use by passing the profile
   identifier with ``--profile`` to ``raft run`` (e.g. ``raft run ... --profile
   my_favorite_profile``).

For information on running RAFT on local hardware, see
:doc:`running-raft-locally`.

Hybrid
------

Choose this path when:

- you want to launch RAFT from a local installation while offloading compute to
  the cloud
- you want to run on AWS

In this mode, you install and run RAFT locally but pass ``--cloud`` to
``raft run`` to execute the pipeline processes on cloud infrastructure. This
gives you the convenience of a local CLI while leveraging cloud compute
resources for scaling.

.. note::
   Hybrid mode is the recommended way to run RAFT on AWS.

Cloud
-----

Choose this path when:

- you want to run on your own GCP infrastructure
- you do not want to install RAFT yourself

In this mode, users set up RAFT projects with the
`BYOC Cloud Launcher <https://spvensko.github.io/raft-ui/raft-cloud-launcher.html>`_
and a RAFT runner image.

For information on running RAFT on GCP, see
:doc:`running-raft-on-the-cloud`.