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The cloud is an appealing platform for bioinformaticians. They can bring<br /> up compute infrastructure on demand and at the scale they requested. They can<br /> access voluminous amounts of open access data hosted in cloud environments.<br /> To make use of the cloud, it is valuable to have cloud native implementations of important <br /> bioinformatics package.<br /> <br /> We discuss ElasticBLAST, a cloud-native package to produce alignments with <br /> the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST). Built on top of the stand-alone BLAST+ <br /> command-line package, ElasticBLAST works with a range of query inputs,<br /> handling anything from a few to millions of query sequences. ElasticBLAST <br /> instantiates cloud instances, dispatches work to them, and deletes resources <br /> when it is done. ElasticBLAST is supported on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud <br /> Platform (GCP). We discuss the implementation of ElasticBLAST, show usage<br /> examples and discuss performance.<br /> <br /> In the last year, several updates have been made to ElasticBLAST. First,<br /> it automatically selects an instance type for the BLAST runs based on <br /> the database. Second, it shuts down cloud resources at the end of the run.<br /> Finally, the ElasticBLAST throughput has been improved.<br /> <br /> The source code and documentation for ElasticBLAST are freely available on Github.