How Nuvolos Enhances Openness and Reproducibility With Easy Container Exporting

Among the core values of the Nuvolos vision are openness and reproducibility. The Nuvolos platform architecture is designed to strengthen openness by ensuring Nuvolos does not force lock-in, competes based on superior features rather than creating artificial dependencies, and combines well with other elements of data pipelines or research workflows. Similarly, we promote reproducibility by design, making it quick and easy to modularise, share, and make available all the artefacts of your research: data, code, and applications. The Nuvolos export feature illustrates the power of these concepts.

Nuvolos has always offered best-in-class configurations of popular computational software directly out of the box, and will continue to do so. But there will be times that you want to change the configuration yourself to support the specific needs of your research project. If you then want to share the results of that project with others, reproducibility can be a major obstacle: it is far from easy to ensure that colleagues, referees, and other interested parties will have the correct configuration of the necessary software in order to reproduce your results. Generally this involves complicated Docker or other containerisation setups that are extremely vulnerable to even small mistakes in configuration or ordering and that take a very long time to test. In order to simplify this process, we designed the Nuvolos export feature.

So how does it work? It's simple. On Nuvolos, you can work with all your familiar tools in your preferred working environment. Now you may need at any point to change the configuration of these tools - say, adding an additional library on top of a preconfigured version Nuvolos provides out of the box. You can of course do this easily within the platform itself. But how to ensure that your work, based on this reconfigured software, remains easily reproducible? You simply go to the application in the overview and click on the export button:

Once the export is completed, Nuvolos hosts a Docker container of your reconfigured software for you (on Docker Hub), and also provides you with a ready-for-use pull script to run directly in Docker. What this means is that you do not need to be a Docker wizard or spend endless time setting up, testing, and re-testing container layers yourself - Nuvolos will do the hard work for you. Instead, we make it easy for you to take the results of your work on the platform and to make them reproducible outside the application itself. All you need is a working version of Docker, you can copy-paste everything else.

With the Nuvolos export feature, we do not just contribute to the reproducibility of your work by making any configuration changes directly reproducible via containerisation; we also ensure that you are never locked in to using Nuvolos when wanting to share with colleagues or journals in the formats that they prefer. We believe Nuvolos' features and its power to save you time and effort on computational research speak for themselves. Unlike some other platforms, we go out of our way to ensure Nuvolos can always be part of a larger pipeline for research work, and is a help rather than a hindrance in developing the best and most efficient workflow that suits your research.

The export feature is fully tested and released, so feel free to give it a try now. Not yet on Nuvolos, but interested in learning how your work can easily be modularised and shared with any colleagues, journals, or referees? Book a demo now to learn more.