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Azure Blob Storage

With Fusion, you can run Nextflow pipelines using the local executor and Azure Blob Storage. This is useful to scale your pipeline execution vertically with a large compute instance, without the need to allocate a large storage volume for temporary pipeline data.

Nextflow CLI​

tip

This configuration requires Docker or a similar container engine to run pipeline tasks.

  1. Set AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME and AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_KEY or AZURE_STORAGE_SAS_TOKEN environment variables to grant Nextflow and Fusion access to your storage credentials. See Credentials for more information.

  2. Add the following to your nextflow.config file:

    wave.enabled = true
    docker.enabled = true
    tower.accessToken = '<PLATFORM_ACCESS_TOKEN>'
    fusion.enabled = true
    fusion.exportStorageCredentials = true

    Replace <PLATFORM_ACCESS_TOKEN> with your Platform access token.

  3. Run the pipeline with the Nextflow run command:

    nextflow run <PIPELINE_SCRIPT> -w az://<BLOB_STORAGE>/scratch

    Replace the following:

    • <PIPELINE_SCRIPT>: your pipeline Git repository URI.
    • <BLOB_STORAGE>: your Azure Blob Storage.
tip

To achieve optimal performance, set up an SSD volume as the temporary directory.

warning

The option fusion.exportStorageCredentials leaks credentials on the task launcher script created by Nextflow. This option should only be used for testing and development purposes.