Hi Dannon,
Yes, this is what I was thinking about. The reason is that at the moment the SGE cluster is managed separately. Also we are likely to migrate to a different cluster infrastructure (probably LSF) and I thought that if I set up a master node on AWS I could than "only" have to change the cluster part.
The idea is that if the user metadata is stored on the AWS master node and his/her files on S3 than it would be relatively easy to just "swap" the cluster that is providing the "raw muscle". But I don't have a good understanding of the galaxy architecture and the documentation seems a bit sparse. So any advice on this is most welcome.
-Nick