Accessing .bam/.cram files from AWS S3? What's the best/easiest way for accessing .bam/.cram files from S3?

I have .bam/.bai .cram/.crai and .bed + .gff files that I want to make available easily to others so they can browse in IGV and other solutions from their computers. There seem to be different solutions after cursory Googling, what would you recommend?

Here is what I've found so far:

IGV:


https://twitter.com/igvteam/status/1187766079457644544
https://umccr.org/blog/igv-amazon-backend-setup/


Samtools: samtools directly supports AWS


http://www.htslib.org/doc/htslib-s3-plugin.html


The full URL format is:

    s3[+SCHEME]://[ID[:SECRET[:TOKEN]]@]BUCKET/PATH
You could set up a public read-only bucket in an S3 account and put your files there. URLs would look like:

https://${username}.s3.amazonaws.com/public/${filename}


For samtools, the request for a BAM file's index should be built off that URL. For IGV, I think you can specify separate, custom URLs for the data and the index resources.

Public buckets are available to all, without need for credentials. So that might be an issue to think about, with respect to billing for web requests and data transfer.

I'm still not 100% certain that samtools/tabix support https requests reliably (I have a prior question on here about that), but that might be one approach.