Note: This blogpost is replicated from the AWS Big Data Blog and can be found here. As the cost of genomic sequencing has rapidly decreased, the amount of publicly available genomic data has soared over the past couple of years. New cohorts and studies have produced massive datasets consisting of over 100,000 individuals. Simultaneously, these datasets have been processed to extract genetic variation across populations, producing mass amounts of variation data for each cohort. In this era of big data, tools like Apache Spark have provided a user-friendly platform for batch processing of large datasets. However, to use such tools as a sufficient replacement to current bioinformatics pipelines, we need more accessible and comprehensive APIs for processing genomic data. We…