Scaling biomedical research on AWS: A cloud-native approach to scientific data management

This article describes how AWS cloud-native architecture enables biomedical research institutions to manage large-scale scientific datasets efficiently and cost-effectively.

• Academic research requires production-grade infrastructure balancing innovation with cost accountability
• Cloud-native platforms support multimodal data with flexible JSON Schema-based metadata frameworks
• Bring-your-own-compute (BYOC) model lets institutions retain infrastructure ownership and security control
• Step Functions, Lambda, ECS Fargate, EFS, and S3 orchestrate scalable, containerized workflows
• Three deployment modes: Basic, Secure, and Compliant for diverse institutional requirements
• Serverless architecture eliminates idle compute costs; expenses transparently allocated to projects
• Immune profiling case study: reduced manual processing from three days to minutes per sample
• Pennsieve platform at University of Pennsylvania implements this architecture successfully

AWS cloud infrastructure makes scalable, secure research computing accessible to scientists without requiring DevOps expertise, accelerating biomedical discovery.