Galaxy Helm chart: a standardized method for deploying production Galaxy servers

The Galaxy application is a popular open-source framework for data intensive sciences, counting thousands of monthly users across more than 100 public servers. To support a growing number of users and a greater variety of use cases, the complexity of a production-grade Galaxy installation has also grown, requiring more administration effort. There is a need for a rapid and reproducible Galaxy deployment method that can be maintained at high-availability with minimal maintenance.

We describe the Galaxy Helm chart that codifies all elements of a production-grade Galaxy installation into a single package. Deployable on Kubernetes clusters, the chart encapsulates supporting software services and implements the best-practices model for running Galaxy. It is also the most rapid method available for deploying a scalable, production-grade Galaxy instance on one's own infrastructure. The chart is highly configurable, allowing systems administrators to swap dependent services if desired. Notable uses of the chart include on-demand, fully-automated deployments on AnVIL, providing training infrastructure for the Bioconductor project, and as the AWS-recommended solution for running Galaxy on the Amazon cloud.

The source code for Galaxy Helm is available at https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy-helm, the corresponding Helm package at https://github.com/CloudVE/helm-charts, and the required Galaxy container image https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy-docker-k8s.