The (ECL) Emerald Cloud Lab is a web-based life sciences lab. It empowers scientists to specify experiments with the precision and reproducibility of code, and to abstract away the physical execution of those experiments to Emerald’s robotically-driven facility in South San Francisco, founded in 2010. The resulting experimental data is accessible in perpetuity, detailed metadata is linked and explorable, and investigators are equipped with a suite of computational tools to drive of the algorithmic components of data analysis, freeing them to focus on the insights that are uniquely derived by scientists.