KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual

Kraken, the legendary sea monster of Scandinavian lore, whose supposed size and appearance would strike fear into the toughest of Nordic sailors, has nothing on the Johns Hopkins-developed taxonomic sequence classification bioinformatics tool that shares its name. A complex C++ and Perl codebase, coupled with an intense resource footprint - including requiring 220G of RAM at runtime - makes applying Kraken reliably at scale as daunting as meeting a colossal cephalopod on open water. In this talk, we’ll discuss how we’re using Kubernetes, Prometheus and Helm at Day Zero Diagnostics to run complex, research-oriented bioinformatics tools, like Kraken, to support the rapid profiling of pathogenic bacteria at scale. More broadly, we’ll address the growing intersection of complex, specialized academic software and its non-academic application at scale with modern tooling and infrastructure.