5 Product Announcements You Won’t Want to Miss from Nextflow Summit Barcelona
Bioinformatics is unlocking the next wave of scientific innovation, with software quickly becoming the foundation of discovery. The question is: how can we empower every scientist with quality software?
At the Nextflow Summit in Barcelona last month, we announced some exciting product updates to further our mission to advance science for everyone through software. Here are five key product announcements from the Nextflow Summit that you won’t want to miss!
💡All the talks from Nextflow Summit Barcelona 2024 are now available on YouTube
1. Nextflow: A fully updated, modernized developer experience
We are committed to creating a world-class developer experience for Nextflow - the most widely used scientific workflow language for scalable bioinformatics. So, we are excited to announce the release of a major version of the Nextflow extension for VSCode, powered by a new Language Server that elevates Nextflow beyond a domain-specific language (DSL) and transforms it into a language in its own right. This new release offers a modernized developer experience by providing:
✔ Precise errors and warnings
✔ Hover hints and code completion
✔ Code navigation
✔ Automatic formatting
✔ Symbol renaming
✔ Parameter schema checking
✔ DAG preview for workflows
✔ Syntax highlighting
💡You can download the Nextflow extension for VSCode today from the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace or Open VSX Registry.
By providing more precise and informative error messages, users can more rapidly and effectively troubleshoot issues, significantly enhancing the developer experience. This makes it easier than ever to build and manage reproducible pipelines at scale.
Interested in finding out more?
• Watch the full “What’s next for Nextflow” talk from the Nextflow Summit.
• Read the “Modernizing the Nextflow Developer Experience: The IDE” blog post.
• Listen to the latest podcast on YouTube or Spotify.
2. Seqera AI: Bioinformatics agent purpose-built for the scientific lifecycle
Scientists and bioinformaticians often spend countless hours transforming and structuring data for analysis. But what if there was a way to manage large-scale data more efficiently, enabling faster iterations and enhanced productivity?
The future of code development is here, and it’s driven by AI. We are excited to announce the launch of Seqera AI, a bioinformatics agent specifically designed to partner with scientists at every stage of their research. Seqera AI simplifies the generation, deployment and optimization of Nextflow pipelines, enabling more efficient pipeline execution. Designed for and by bioinformaticians, Seqera AI enables you to:
✔ Convert bash or other workflow language scripts into Nextflow
✔ Debug and resolve script errors with comprehensive explanations
✔ Test, verify and self-correct Nextflow code with high accuracy
✔ Discover the most suitable bioinformatics pipelines for your research
Want to learn more about Seqera AI?
• Watch the full talk by Evan Floden at the Nextflow Summit
• Read the “Faster Bioinformatics with Seqera AI ” blog post.
• Try Seqera AI yourself!
3. Fusion: Version 2.4 and Fusion Snapshots
Storage is the bottleneck for data pipelines. Fusion is unique as it allows pipeline tools to work natively with object storage and is designed to optimize access to large datasets. Moreover, Fusion implements a smart caching algorithm to use logical disk as a cache and speed up I/O access, and eliminates the need for custom AMI or configuration, zero-install and maintenance. Our latest version, Fusion 2.4, provides:
✔ Enhanced stability with large workloads
✔ Improved reliability when using small disk for caching
✔ New ability to persist POSIX and extend file attributes
💡For more insights, listen to the Nextflow Summit talk by Paolo Di Tommaso!
We also announced the release of Fusion Snapshots into Private Preview. Fusion Snapshots enable you to fully optimize your Nextflow pipelines, giving you the best cost performance for pipelines like RNA-Seq. While running on cloud spot instances is an economical choice, the tendency to be reclaimed can lead to costly retries when tasks are interrupted. Fusion Snapshots address this issue by capturing the running state of a task and securely moving it off the instance. When a new spot instance becomes available, the task can seamlessly resume from the exact point it left off, ensuring no data is lost and minimizing run time. This enables you to:
✔ Efficiently capture Nextflow pipeline states at any moment
✔ Automatically restore captured state into new environments
Interested in Fusion Snapshots?
• Register your interest for the Fusion Snapshots Private Preview.
• Read the "Fusion Snapshots: optimal use of spot instances blog post" to find out more.
4. Data Studios: Custom Environments in Seqera
Data Studios allows you to create, manage, and share interactive analysis environments with just a single click. By seamlessly integrating data and compute in a familiar setup, Data Studios enables you to work in an environment tailored to your needs. With the release of Data Studios custom environments, you can now dynamically build, or provide a secure source for, analysis environments based on your organizational or team-specific requirements.
With Data Studios, you can choose from one of Seqera’s four standard templates—Jupyter, RStudio, VSCode, or Xpra—and customize them with additional Conda packages to suit your project needs. Behind the scenes, Wave will augment Data Studios by building the Conda environment directly into the container, ensuring both reproducibility and security. Alternatively, you can link to a container template hosted in a public, or private, hosted registry as your environment source.
Want to find out more about Data Studios custom environments?
• Read the “Introducing Data Studios - Custom environments” blog post.
• Watch the talk by Evan Floden from Nextflow Summit Barcelona.
5. Wave: Security scanning for containers
Security is often a top priority when deploying data pipelines in regulated environments. In the latest version of Nextflow (24.10.0), we have introduced automated security scanning for containers, a feature that significantly enhances the security of your containerized workloads. This new capability allows Nextflow to scan for security vulnerabilities in any container used within your workflows (not just ones built by Wave).
By using Wave’s container provisioning service, Nextflow now performs on-demand scans before executing containers in pipeline tasks. With built-in support for container mirroring, users can maintain an on-demand cache of container images, optimizing network transfers while enhancing security. If vulnerabilities are detected, an execution error is triggered, preventing the use of compromised containers.
Interested?
• Read the "Enhancing security in data pipelines with Nextflow and Wave" blog post
• Access the docs to learn more.
We want your feedback!
We can't wait for you to explore these new product updates and enhancements. We'd love to hear your questions and feedback, and you can always reach us in the Seqera Community!