redun VS huey

I'm personally a huge fan of redun¹ for running computational pipelines. It's pure python, it's easy to learn/debug, it has automatic caching, retry, provenance logging, and a great integration with AWS Batch for running large jobs. I've been really impressed with how easy it is to run a job to completion that fans out to thousands of AWS spot instances at once.

I've used nextflow in the past, and I've found it to be much harder to use. Learning another DSL is annoying, documentation was sparse, I constantly ran into bugs, and it was hard to debug in general. I don't know how much it's changed over the past 3 years though.

¹https://github.com/insitro/redun

I've considered using Nextflow for bioinformatics pipelines but have yet to take the plunge. At work, I develop a proteomics pipeline that is composed of huey¹ tasks (Python library; simple alternative to Celery) which either use subprocess to call out to some external tool, or are just pure python. It runs in a worker container which is created by docker swarm, and all containers pull jobs from redis. For our scale, it works great. However, I don't have control over the resource utilization of individual steps, and in the past I've had issues with the pipeline blocking as a result of how I was chaining tasks together. I think something like Nextflow would remove these limitations, but one thing I think I would miss is the ability to debug individual pipeline steps locally with an interactive debugger. As far as I can tell, Nextflow has logging/tracing facilities but nothing quite like an interactive debugger. I'd be happy to be told I'm wrong, or even that I'm doing it wrong.

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¹ https://github.com/coleifer/huey/

Other options are DjangoQ and Huey, which tend to work ok. Of the two I prefer DjangoQ. Database backed, don't require the Redis/Celery rigmarole.

Funny, just this moment i finally switched from Celery to huey. And so far I don't regret. huey looks very promising, has good documentation and is well integrated into DJango. You should give it a try: https://github.com/coleifer/huey

huey – a little task queue for python

Huey -> Same again?

Huey: https://github.com/coleifer/huey

I just want to add that a couple celery alternatives worth looking at include huey and dramatiq.

huey

same, I ran into an issue cos of django-background-tasks. I am thinking to replace it with huey