While I think it&#x27;s great to have Google putting their weight behind standardization efforts like Global Alliance for Genomic Health (GA4GH), I really don&#x27;t get the need to replace VCF and BAM files with API calls.<p>Ultimately, the &quot;hard part&quot; about genomics is not big-data requiring Spanner and BigTable to get anything done. I actually wrote a blog post about this this week:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.goldenhelix.com&#x2F;grudy&#x2F;genomic-data-is-big-data-but-that-is-not-the-hard-part&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.goldenhelix.com&#x2F;grudy&#x2F;genomic-data-is-big-data-b...</a><p>Both BAM and VCF files can be hosted through a plain HTTP file-server and be meaningfully queried through their BAI&#x2F;TBI indexes. Visualization tools like our GenomeBrowse or the Broad&#x27;s IGV can already read S3 hosted genomic files directly without having an API layer and very efficiently (gzip compressed blocks of binary data). So, I see the translation of the exact same data into API-only accessible storage system, where I can&#x27;t download the VCF and do quick and iterative analysis on it more of a downside that plus.<p>Disclaimer: I build variant interpretation software for NGS data at Golden Helix. Our customers are often small clinical labs who size of data and volume are not driving them to the cloud.