23andMe Innovates Drug and Therapeutic Discovery with HPC on AWS

Genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe provides direct-to-customer genetic testing, giving customers valuable insights into their genetics. 23andMe needed more scalability and flexibility in its high-performance computing (HPC) to manage multiple petabytes of data efficiently. The company had been using an on-premises solution but began using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2016 to store important data. In 2021, the company made a full migration to the cloud, a process that took only 4 months. Since adopting AWS HPC services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and AWS Batch, which lets developers, scientists, and engineers easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS, 23andMe has increased its scalability, flexibility, and cost optimization.

23andMe used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based on the experience that AWS has in migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. Using AWS MAP, 23andMe could achieve a smooth migration in only 4 months. “What AWS MAP was offering us was the ability to do a fast, massive shift,” says de Leon. “Usually when you do that, it’s very expensive, but AWS MAP solved that problem.” 23andMe migrated everything out of its data center and into the cloud on AWS. One year after migrating to AWS, as the AWS MAP program ends for 23andMe, it is achieving equal or better price performance because of the team’s diligence in adopting AWS services.

Managing scientists’ file-based home directories presented another challenge. To solve this issue, 23andMe turned to Weka, an AWS Partner. The WekaIO parallel file system is functional, cost-effective, and compatible with Amazon S3. This helped 23andMe’s internal team implement changes with no disruption to the customer's experience. When the migration was complete, 23andMe started taking advantage of AWS services for HPC like Amazon EC2 C5 Instances, which deliver cost-effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio for running advanced compute-intensive workloads. It chose this type of Amazon EC2 instance because it was the closest analog to its previous computing resources.

23andMe quickly discovered the benefits of having a variety of Amazon EC2 instance types available for its use. “We have the entire menu of Amazon EC2 offerings available to us, and one way to achieve efficiency is finding an optimal fit for resource use,” says Justin Graham, manager of an infrastructure engineering group at 23andMe. As of 2022, the company uses many instance types flexibly, including Amazon EC2 X2i Instances, the next generation of memory-optimized instances delivering improvements in performance, price performance, and costs for memory-intensive workloads. 23andMe also uses AWS Batch to provide rightsizing and match resources to determine which instance types to use, which helps with price-performance optimization.

23andMe can scale on demand to match compute capacity for actual workloads and then scale back down. “To give a sense of scale, we had a peak compute job running with over 80,000 virtual CPUs operating at once,” says de Leon. In addition, using Amazon EC2 instances has removed resource contention for 23andMe’s researchers. “Recently, we had a 3-week production workload finish 33 percent ahead of schedule. Since migrating to AWS, our ability to deliver compute resources to our researchers is now unmatched,” says Graham.

While enjoying these benefits of using HPC services on AWS, 23andMe has not had to compromise on its initial spending goals. “Our goal was to keep our costs the same but gain flexibility, capability, and value. Savings is less about the bottom line and more about what we gain for what we spend,” says de Leon. 23andMe has achieved increases in cost optimization by using a variety of AWS services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud, as well as Amazon EC2. 23andMe is all-in on AWS and aims to continue pursuing price-performance optimization for its workloads.

23andMe could migrate its existing environment with virtually no changes, and over time started incorporating more AWS services into its solution. The company is looking for further ways to optimize costs using AWS, exploring services like AWS Graviton processor, which delivers excellent price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. The company is finding opportunities to be cost optimal while retaining the resources it needs for on-demand computing. “We’re about 10 months past migration, and the eventual goal is to drive a faster process from idea to validation. Our researchers are faster and more efficient, and our hope is to see a big research breakthrough,” says de Leon.