Introducing Nextflow Tower - Seamless monitoring of data analysis workflows from anywhere

The past month Seqera introduced Nextflow Tower, a management and monitoring system for Nextflow data analysis pipeline applications.

Tower allows users to track the execution of any Nextflow workflow application in real-time, providing useful insights about execution metrics and metadata, making them accessible throughout an easy to use web interface.

The Tower project shares with Nextflow the same design principles and philosophy, that is: first and foremost agility, hiding unnecessary complexity and empowering users to deploy their data pipelines at scale in a portable manner across platforms.

This is the reason why we designed Tower to work with any existing application, irrespective of the target execution environment. You can use it to track the workflow execution on your laptop, compute cluster or cloud, without any change to your configuration.

Just add the option -with-tower to your usual Nextflow command line (and set the Tower API token in your environment).

Quick demo!

API centric

It’s important to stress that Tower doesn’t want to be yet another workflow platform (there are already many out there!). Instead, Tower aims to be an API centric foundational component that can easily be integrated into existing systems and infrastructure.

This is why we have released Nextflow Tower as an open-source project licensed with Mozilla Public Licence 2.0.

We want users to be able to download and install it on their infrastructure if they prefer and to contribute new ideas and features if they find it useful!

What’s next

Nextflow Tower is currently in beta access. We are very happy to see that the project has already received a lot of interest and enthusiastic reactions! In the following days, we’ll roll out new features, better analytics, and we will release a stable version of the Tower API.

Of course this just the beginning. We are working hard to make Tower not just able to collect and track pipeline executions but also to better assist users in the optimization and deployment of their pipelines. All of this continuing in our vision of enabling frictionless, portable, data pipelines across cloud and clusters. Stay tuned!