AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Your experiences with cloud rendering?

Hi

We are thinking about using the cloud this year. But I have not found a lot of information about it.
So I would like to ask other deadline users about their experience with cloud rendering.
What are your experiences with cloud rendering?
Big issues, small issues, advantages, things to consider, …

Questions that come to my mind at the moment:

  1. Is it possible that the cloud VMs join our domain/Active directory?
  2. What about secure connections to the Cloud?
  3. We are Windows based, but Linux VMs are cheaper.
    Have you used the Windows to Linux conversion to convert Maya Binary Scenes?
    If you do, how does it work? Anything we need to avoid/cannot use?
  4. Data transfer.
    How do you transfer your data to the cloud?

Thanks

I can say what I’ve seen in the wild here, and what I’ve done with clients to deal with it.

  1. Joining AD:

This is entirely possible across most providers. I found this for AWS specifically:
docs.aws.amazon.com/directoryse … tance.html

The customer had already set up some other pieces here so I’m a bit hazy on those details. One gotcha was that every time a new machine was created a new entry was added to the AD tree. Many customers may have hundreds or thousands of machines across a month (say starting and stopping 100 machines every week). This cause cruft to build up and one solution was to have a machine to act as a bridge to the corporate domain, and they ran a script to prune defunct machines.

  1. Secure Connections to the Cloud

AWS Portal uses SSH tunneling for the Deadline data, and HTTPS for communication between your on-prem server and S3. You can mix and match here, so it’s pretty open. I can dive deeper into the AWS Portal stuff, but you can read over it here:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ … aws-portal
deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/f … -in-action

  1. Converting Maya Binary

Normally, we recommend working with Maya ASCII files, but that was before we used the dirmap command to convert paths. These days either format should work when using MayaBatch, but if you use MayaCmd, the MA files are still best.

  1. Transferring files

AWS Portal is the way we support it out of the box. It’ll use S3 to move the files around and will try to pre-cache some (so far for Maya, 3DS Max and Modo) and move over files as they’re requested by the nodes. Re-used files won’t need to be transferred.

There are a number of different options for each of these, so I’ll open the floor to more ideas.

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