>> All right. Well good morning.
I'm John Thuotte.
I'm with the Azure Specialized Compute Group.
I'm a Industry program manager
focused on media and entertainment,
and we're going to talk about
our Rendering in Azure today.
Sort of the flow is,
a little introduction to Rendering,
why render in the cloud and
then the value of our Rendering in Azure.
So what is Rendering?
Definition is, generating an image from
[inaudible] commonly a 3D image from a 3D model.
I mean, So you're taking
a 3D model and creating an image.
The data input structure consists of geometry,
viewpoint, shading, lighting, texturing.
Basically it brings models to life.
Rendering is by far the most compute intensive component,
If you're looking at an entire production lifecycle
from storyboard to final production.
If you counted all the computational core hours,
Rendering it would probably be
about 90 percent of that consumption.
It is a highly complex distributed process
with dependencies between
the render nodes and the digital assets, the storage.
So there's different types of Rendering,
at the highest level there is
real time, and offline Rendering.
As it sounds, like real time is
for gaming and interactive processes
where you're measuring response time
in milliseconds or tens of milliseconds.
Offline Rendering is you might think of stuff like
theatrical visual effects where it can
take over 24 hours to render a single frame,
sometimes double triple that.
Then there's different types of rendering,
depending on the look and feel,
and the attributes you want out of
the render as, raterization for speed.
You are computing more on
primitives or elements which are usually triangles,
which is a rather than pixel by
pixel which is a much faster process.
Ray casting and ray tracing,
you have a specific viewpoint,
different levels of optical sophistication
and how reflection is handled.
Radiosity is calculated independent of camera,
it's more surface oriented.
You get a real,
it's a culture indirect illumination.
Very well. And oftentimes these are
used in combination with one another.
Again, depending on the look and feel you're looking for.
Now who uses Rendering?
And I like to throw this slide
up here because a lot of people just think
that Rendering, and gaming,
and visual effects, it's usually
really used across multiple industries.
You know advertising and marketing for prototyping,
and packaging, think architecture,
urban planning for a 3D modeling,
you know walkthroughs, fly through,
drive throughs, spatial planning,
you know parts, all that.
Oil industry, reservoir analysis,
manufacturing, automotive aerospace, you know.
Like modeling concept cars,
wingspans, seats, park place,
all that sort of stuff.
So this is a very simplified typical production pipeline
from pre-production, production, post-production.
Just showing you we we're Rendering fits
within there between concept,
storyboard, modeling, rigging,
animation, the final production.
And you have asset management tools
across the span of those and then
just showing some of the specific software
like 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya,
RenderMan and Arnold V-Ray some,
of the popular Rendering machines that we support.
This is a VFX pipeline,
so a little more detailed view of VFX visual effects.
This is also simplified.
This is shown as sort of a left to right flow.
In reality there's multiple iterations
back there would be so to be arrows
going all the way back to different boxes
and recirculating several iterations.
So again, you are here about the render in pipeline,
it's a very complex distributed environment.
So why would somebody want to render into cloud?
It's really similar reasons you want to
render for almost any application.
But for Rendering it's even more pronounced,
because if you worked in a production pipeline,
generally the Rendering needs
are most heavy at the end of the pipeline.
So if you have 10,000 cores on premise,
you might need 30,000
in the last two months of production.
So it lends itself very well to bursting environment.
So again, why would you want to render in the cloud?
Just to scale, you know tens of thousands of
cores available as needed at different times in a cycle,
and the elasticity to scale up and
down in that environment as needed.
Only paying for what you use.
The reach and locality, you have artists,
workers wherever they are with
Azure with over 42 data centers around the globe,
there's always a data center fairly
close to that artist if latencies are concerned.
Hardware selection, you always have the
latest and greatest hardware available.
You're not worried about
three year capital appreciation life cycles,
no infrastructure cost or
less infrastructure costs if
you're bursting to the cloud.
Obviously, you're not paying for the space,
the heating, the cooling, the power et cetera.
And they are known controlled costs,
you know what is going to cost per
compute hour per storage going in.
Just a Rendered image of a vessel
from a company we work with, Oceaneering, again,
just sort of showing I know I'm at a gaming show,
but just showing the diversity of
the Rendering in the different applications.
This company does a lot of sort of
aquatic submersibles, vessels, windmills.
So what does Azure offer?
I like to think of it as a compute platform.
Obviously at the lowest level you've got your hardware,
the infrastructure and what we'll call
the cloud services on top of that, the IS.
The infrastructure as a service,
platform as a service, the virtualization,
the operating system, middleware runtime stuff.
At the top level you have your application developers
running whatever it is you're
running whatever application are working.
You still need to connect
the infrastructure with your application.
Just like on-premise, you need to build out
manage and configure the environment.
Azure has several tools to help orchestrate,
provision, manage that environment.
One's called Azure Batch,
one's called Cycle Cloud and we'll talk
about those a little more and how
they help simplify it and
let you get access to that massive compute power.
Or somebody would yell at me if I
didn't put up at least what our platforms look like.
So you know everything from entry level to high level,
high performance optimized for different environments.
The great thing is, if somebody asked me what's
the best virtual machine for them it's like,
I don't know, let's find out.
It's really easy to benchmark,
to figure out the exact VM
that is optimal for your environment.
Also like the planout,
if you have a big cluster on-premise,
by definition it cannot
be optimized for all of your workflows.
In the cloud, I mean if you have 1000 core cluster
running for 10 hours or
10,000 core cluster running for one hour,
or ten, one K clusters
running for one hour each, It all costs the same.
So what's your environment?
What makes the most sense for you to implement?
So how to render in Azure.
There's a couple different ways we can work with
manage render services via partners.
Azure has software and services,
I meant Azure Batch is sort of a plumbing,
what is called at high level.
Azure Batch Rendering is
Azure Batch plus paper use, licensing and templates.
Cycle Cloud is a complete end
to end workflow orchestration tool.
Also, of course you need storage to
match and whether object, NFS, distributed storage.
Recently we acquired Avere
which has a huge footprint in media and entertainment,
which is a real good hybrid storage solution.
Little bit on Managed Services.
All the partners are a little bit
different in what they offer and what they do.
Just trying to give a little overview
of a generalized what they do.
But it's, they simplify the complexity of
managing and controlling the render pipeline.
Several of them have hybrid solutions.
You can mix that on-premise with
Cloud support for most
of the favorite software out there.
I don't want to say all of it
because then somebody would ding me.
And a few of those partners we
work with are Conductor, Qube!
from PipelineFX, Royal Render,
RenderWise, there's a few others.
Got to throw up an image once in a while.
This is from something
called Anchors Up. It was Rendered using Qube!.
It was a Managed Service on Azure,
and that was an animated feature.
So at Azure Batch,
this is back to the sort of the
platform picture we saw earlier.
We've got your lower layer
"Hardware" and "Cloud Services" at the lowest level,
and then, your application on top.
There is a bunch of the configuration,
and management, provisioning, queuing task.
How do you manage hardware failures?
How do you manage software failures?
Authentication, Azure Batch takes care of that for you.
Simplifies that plumbing for you.
So, avoid building infrastructure and yet let people
work on making your application more efficient.
It's being used in Media transcoding,
Rendering, and other industries.
Financial services, we have
a pretty good footprint, some manufacturing.
Batch Rendering, so again,
that is more of a single license,
single point of entry, to simplify.
So, we're finding interest in this more in
smaller and medium size shops that may not have
slate white licensing with the larger software providers.
So, for a single license,
you can pay for your software, your Arnold,
V-Ray, Maya tools, as well,
as a consumption and storage that go along with that,
and have a single point of payment.
Microsoft, I guess, in its commitment to [inaudible] ,
it made some recent acquisitions.
One of them being CycleCloud.
So CycleCloud's a complete end-to-end
workflow orchestration tool.
It's very valuable in
an IT organization that
wants to manage multiple projects,
multiple departments, multiple project being a game,
or a visual effects effort, or whatever it might be.
It helps you separate cost controls,
set thresholds on number of cores
that are available to where in
people send alerts to management, that sort of tool.
Sort of a pictorial representation
of CycleCloud, what they do.
And the idea being it's
a complete life cycle from start to finish.
It's not just simplifying
your initial onboarding and such,
it's ongoing, excuse me,
optimization and management of that environment.
Also, recent acquisition of Avere, I mentioned this.
Avere is in pretty much every major studio
and VFX shop around.
Helps you eliminate latency between on-premise and Cloud.
It helps you reduce the amount of
data you need to move between Cloud and on-premise,
which reduces your egress costs, of course.
It helps you keep your storage as an NFS environment,
and still transfer that
to blob or inexpensive object storage in
the cloud without having
to go through hoops to make that happen,
which you do with some other solutions.
So, this is a simple solution workflow
showing a Rendered management station,
and rendering and storage on premise with the Avere FXT.
Sort of a replication of that in
the Cloud being synced by the software,
and managed with the authentication,
and another Log-in and Analytic tools you get with Azure.
Slightly different, some of our partners,
this is on Qube!, they don't
put a managed node in the Cloud.
They manage it all from on-premise.
So, I put that in as an example,
there's just different ways to go about it.
We would sit down and go through you,
know what's your requirements? What do you prefer?
Not going to go through all this but these are
an actual requirement list from somebody we're
working on with a Rendering in the Cloud project.
And such as to say,
we have the VMs, the storage,
the security, temporary storage,
to meet their needs.
I mean, there's a variety of services,
all are not listed here.
I do want to point on the security side,
we're by far the most certifications of any cloud vendor.
We're the only CSP,
that's MPAA independently audit certified,
we're CDSA certified, and a bunch of
other European ones that I
can't remember all the acronyms for.
A bunch of partners, a few we've mentioned
already, Avid and Adobe,
two big ones I haven't mentioned,
and yes, several others.
I mean the V-Ray integration
with the Azure Batch Rendering
was just announced a couple of weeks ago.
I want to leave it with a quote from Jellyfish.
they're a VFX shop that we work with out of
the UK, pretty good size.
But I think this comment from Jeremy Smith, their CTO,
encompasses a lot of the benefits of Azure.
So, the beauty of Azure GPUs
is we get a top-end GPU at our disposal."
So that the latest and greatest
hardware at their fingertips,
paid for by the minute, hour a week,
so only paying for what they use.
If I hire 10 contractors a month,
I'd have to buy dedicated workstations savings.
So, the ability to elastically expand when need be,
not explicitly stated there,
those 10 workers can be anywhere in the world.
"By using HPC, we have
a lot more confidence going after big jobs."
So, just knowing they have
access to tens of thousands of cores,
they could go after jobs
they couldn't go after a year ago,
or more jobs simultaneously.
That's the Jellyfish render and
that's all I had, any questions?
Are we good? All right,
thank you for spending your morning.