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 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 and a RAFT runner image.

For information on running RAFT on GCP, see Running RAFT on the cloud.