© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Usman Shakeel – Amazon Web Services
Ryan Russell – Thinkbox Software
Cloud Rendering at Scale with
Thinkbox Deadline on AWS
Visual Effects and
Animation1
Who is using AWS for Rendering?
2
3
Theme Parks
Gaming
Marketing Departments4
5
6
Manufacturing
Bio-Informatics &
Drug Design
7 Engineering and Architecture Design
VFX/Animation Rendering - workflow components
CompostingModeling Backend
Rendering
Asset Management
Collaboration and Task Management
Boutique Studios
• No or very little on-premise capacity
• Limited Licenses
• Project based work from customers
(large studios)
• Very tight budgets
• Some projects need very large scale
(more compute)
• No or very little infrastructure
optimization
• Content Security (mandated by their customers)
• Mostly All-in Cloud Workflows
A tale of two customers
Large VFX/Animation Houses/Studios
• A decent on-premise investment
• Unlimited Licenses
• Project based work from different Studio projects
• Tight Deadlines and producers decide the budgets
• Often under immense pressure for higher quality (more compute) and faster renders (more compute)
• Mastered the on-premise infrastructure optimization
• Content Security
• Hybrid Workflows
They both ask us the same thing …
The Cloud Scale
The ability to spin up thousands of cores on-demand
Turning CapEx into OpEx
No need to invest in infrastructure that may not be needed
after projects are finished
The most up-to-date configurations
Latest CPU and memory configurations
Large bandwidth between instances
Fast Storage options
A project based “disposable” infrastructure
Flexible (Cloud Elastic) Licensing
They both tell us the same thing …
=< $0.01per core/hour
Access to thousands of
cores whenever needed
No upfront investments in infrastructure
Easier collaboration
Ecosystem of
software providers
Access to large memory configs to do 6K/10K renders
Project based “disposable” infrastructure
Rendering in the Cloud - State of the Union
Scale at a very cheap price
• EC2 Spot
– Spot Fleet
– Termination notification
– Further Automation with Lambda
• What is large scale?
– 10s/100s/1000s/10000s cores
Rendering in the Cloud - State of the Union
Data/Content Migration
• Aspera, Signiant, File Catalyst, Expedat
Storage
• Shared File Systems
– Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
– Intel Lustre
• Storage Cache for Hybrid Workloads
– Avere vFXT
– Penzura
– Netapp Cloud-onTap
Rendering in the Cloud - State of the Union
Licensing at Cloud Scale
• SaaS
• AWS Marketplace/Usage based licensing
Rendering in the Cloud - State of the Union
3D Modeling in the Cloud
• GPU based EC2 instances
• Terdici PCoIP, AWS Appstream, Nice, Frame, Otoy
• Windows and Linux Support (VNC+VirtualGL)
Rendering in the Cloud - State of the Union
Content Security
• AWS alignment with the latest MPAA cloud based application
guidelines for content security – August 2015
• Amazon VPC private endpoint for S3 – enables a true private
workflow capability
• Encryption & key management capabilities using Amazon Key
management Service (KMS)
• Amazon Glacier Vault for high-value media/originals
Introduction to Deadline
• What is Deadline?
– Cross-platform render farm management.
– Manages on-premise, Cloud-based, or hybrid render farms of all sizes.
– Supports over 70 content creation applications out of the box.
and more!
– Used in VFX, Design, Broadcast, AEC (Architecture, Engineering,
Construction), Education, etc.
Introduction to Deadline
• What is Deadline used for?
– Distribute frames of an animation
sequence across multiple nodes.
– Perform other types of processing, including particle simulations, Quicktime
movie generation, file conversion, etc.
– Distribute regions of a still frame
across multiple nodes (Jigsaw).
Use Deadline to automate your pipeline!
• Dependencies
– Allows jobs to start automatically.
– Job, frame, script, and asset
dependencies.
• Custom plugins
– Write Custom plugins to perform
any type of custom processing.
– Control anything with an API
(command line, scripting, etc).
Use Deadline to automate your pipeline!
• Event triggers
– Automate tasks when jobs enter certain states.
• Update internal pipeline mgmt software when a job starts and finishes.
• Do some post processing on the rendered output after a job finishes (Draft).
• Draft
– Compositing Python module that is
included with Deadline.
– Automate compositing operations on rendered images.
• Quicktime movie generation (multiple movies at different resolutions).
• File conversion (convert EXRs to JPGs before downloading for review).
Deadline Components
• Deadline Repository
– Consists of a MongoDB database and a shared file server.
– One Repository per render farm.
• Deadline Client
– Includes the Slave and Monitor applications (in addition to others).
– Slaves run on the render nodes to control the rendering process.
– Monitor is used to view render jobs and render nodes.
– Client applications connect directly to the database and file server.
Rendering with Deadline in AWS Cloud
• Rendering in AWS Cloud with Deadline 7
– AWS can be an extension of your on-premise farm, or it can host your
entire render farm.
– Think of it as a remote office that you connect to over VPN.
Rendering with Deadline in AWS Cloud
• What tools are currently available?
– Amazon Cloud Plugin for Deadline:
• View and control existing AWS instances
directly from the Deadline Monitor.
– Deadline VMX:
• Automates the launching / termination of
AWS instances based on jobs in queue.
– Deadline AWS Cloud Wizard:
• Set up a basic Deadline render farm in
the AWS Cloud in about 30 minutes.
Deadline 8 makes Cloud rendering easier!
• Deadline 8
– Currently accepting beta requests (more info later).
– Introduces Usage Based Licensing for metered licensing.
– New Proxy Server application removes VPN requirement.
Deadline 8 makes Cloud rendering easier!
• Usage Based Licensing
– Render nodes pull metered licenses from Thinkbox’s Cloud-based
license server.
– Usage is tracked per minute.
– Bulk minutes will be available via Thinkbox’s online store.
– Store will eventually host 3rd party licensing (Nuke, Vray, etc).
– Let’s check out the store!
Deadline 8 makes Cloud rendering easier!
Deadline 8 makes Cloud rendering easier!
• Deadline Proxy Server
– Facilitates communication between the Deadline applications and the
Deadline Database and Repository.
– Implements REST over HTTP(s), and can be combined with Nginx or
Apache for SSL security, removing the requirement of a VPN.
Deadline 8 hybrid render farm
Deadline 8 hybrid render farm
Local and Cloud render nodes in
the same render farm
Local and Cloud render nodes
working on the same job
Connected to Proxy Server
What’s coming in the future?
• Deadline VMX Improvements
– Improved budget and cap flexibility.
• Budgets based on amount to spend
per day, per month, etc.
• Budgets based on number of concurrent AWS instances.
– Support for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.
• Spot Instances are a great alternative for VFX rendering resources.
• Render more frames across more nodes concurrently at a reduced cost.
• If Spot Instances are terminated while rendering, Deadline can recover
those frames and assign to other render nodes.
What’s coming in the future?
• AWS CloudFormation Templates
– Create an entire Deadline render farm infrastructure on AWS Cloud.
– Create AWS Cloud render nodes to connect to an existing on-premise
Deadline render farm.
• Asset Transferring
– Build asset awareness into Deadline jobs.
– Jobs won’t render until all assets are available.
– Missing assets will be automatically transferred.
Further Reference
• Join the Deadline 8 beta!
– Email [email protected] to join the beta.
– Free usage based licensing during the beta.
• Check out M&E solutions on AWS at:
http://aws.amazon.com/digital-media/solutions/
• Questions?
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