  The computational demands for scientific applications are continuously
increasing. The emergence of cloud computing has enabled on-demand resource
allocation. However, relying solely on infrastructure as a service does not
achieve the degree of flexibility required by the scientific community. Here we
present a microservice-oriented methodology, where scientific applications run
in a distributed orchestration platform as software containers, referred to as
on-demand, virtual research environments. The methodology is vendor agnostic
and we provide an open source implementation that supports the major cloud
providers, offering scalable management of scientific pipelines. We demonstrate
applicability and scalability of our methodology in life science applications,
but the methodology is general and can be applied to other scientific domains.
