Proposed QIIME2 Roadmap

You have the idea correct.

One of our explicit goals is to support everything from a laptop to a cluster. This means progressive enhancement. For the average user, it conceptually isn't much different from an IPython notebook, where you type `ipython notebook`. Instead you might type `qiime start`, it could launch the server and the web-browser pointed at that server and the server will just use something like a SQLLite database at a path.

In the context of a cluster you could have the qiime-server running as an explicit service (like `service qiime start`) which users log into using their cluster credentials. The sysadmin can take responsibility for using a different database, managing plugins, ports, etc.

Here's a diagram representing the idea maybe a little better:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_qySw7nb-DKOVU0NFlNRHZvTWc/edit?usp=sharing

In that diagram, each component can exist on it's own host, or they can all exist on the same host (like a laptop). 

But definitely the goal is for this to be as simple as possible and to work out-of-the-box.