I’m currently in the process of setting up a studio to start doing cloud rendering using aws spot instances.
It’s a bit unclear whether the best practice is to get setup with AWS Portal or the Spot Event Plugin. From my understanding, AWS Portal is more fully-featured but both can happily run alongside each other.
As our use case is primarily running spot instances to quickly push out renders, and I want to get us setup and testing renders ASAP, I’m starting off with setting up the Spot Event Plugin.
Does anyone have any advice about which would be the best way to go?
Would your foresee any issues with starting off with the Spot Event Plugin?
Will I be missing any key features?
What is Thinkbox’s recommended way forward? - it’s a bit confusing having 2 different plugins to do this and I haven’t been able to find any documentation that gives any guidance about why you would choose one over the other.
Are you running a Cloud Native Studio or local datacentre/onprem?
If local/onprem, use AWS Portal as it will handle the file syncing between your onprem storage and AWS seamlessly. You’ll also be able to manually provision and manage fleets of spot instances through the AWS Portal Interface. AWS Portal provisions/manages the cloud infrastructure (VPC, subnets, storage) and presents a simple user intuitive interface from which to manage spot fleets from.
If cloud native studio, then use Spot Event. Which will automatically provision render workers based on render demand in the queue. Spot Event only handles worker provisioning, so you’ll need to have cloud infrastructure like VPC, Subnets and Storage already setup and configured.