Welcome to episode four of Inside Azure for IT.
I'm Erin Chapple, CVP of Azure Core Product and Design.
Now innovation is at the heart of what we do at Microsoft.
We continually push the limits
of what technology can accomplish,
because we've seen the amazing things
that you can do with it.
In this episode, we're going to get a behind the scenes
perspective on how three businesses
are using cutting edge technologies,
like high performance computing, Azure Quantum,
and AI to power innovation, and generate new kinds
of business impact.
Whether it's an animation and visual effect studio
like Jellyfish Pictures, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
or a self flying air taxi company like Volocopter,
innovative Azure capabilities
are helping change the way people do business
and influencing others in their industries to do the same.
In this first segment, we'll chat
with Jeremy Smith and Karla Young from Jellyfish Pictures,
one of the world's largest animation
and visual effects studios.
They'll share how
they create the amazing visuals we see in movies
like "How to Train your Dragon: Homecoming"
or some of the most recent Star Wars films.
Using Azure high-performance computing
to accelerate image rendering,
they have to spin up tens of thousands
of cores at a moment's notice
and manage all of that rich content securely
and in a single place without replication.
Now, in our second segment, we'll talk
with members of the Azure Quantum team
about how they took a Quantum-inspired approach
to scheduling optimization challenges
for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And in our third segment, we'll discuss how Volocopter,
a pioneer in providing air taxi and drone services
in urban environments is building a cloud-native
solution to integrate with smart cities
and existing mobility operations
using Azure infrastructure and AI.
Now I'd like to welcome Jeremy Smith,
Chief Technology Officer and Karla Young,
Head of PR, Marketing and Communications
at Jellyfish Pictures.
Welcome Jeremy and Karla.
I'm delighted you can join me on Inside Azure for IT.
Thanks Erin, I'm excited to be here.
Thanks for having us Erin.
Now through our partnership, we've learned
about the challenges you face in visual effects
and animation work, which is typically project based.
Traditionally artists would do the vast majority
of their work on premises due to the
just a huge amount of compute capacity that's needed
for rendering and the security measured required
to protect intellectual property.
And when that pandemic hit this model posed a big challenge.
Can you talk about how Jellyfish adapted
to accommodate remote work and maintain business continuity?
Sure. Well, when the fir-, as you said
when the pandemic first hit, when very many
of studios in our industry were having to implement freezes
or forcing or being forced to lay off employees,
Jellyfish actually hired 200 people
from across 20 different countries.
Thankfully we'd already moved large portions
of our business to the cloud starting back in 2016.
So we were able to scale and adapt pretty quickly
to power a more remote workforce.
In this industry talent isn't an infinite resource,
so being able to recruit artists regardless
of their physical location was a huge advantage.
In many ways, talent is our biggest driver of growth.
So the fact that people were able to work safely, securely
and productively in their own technological environment
with Azure allowed us to continue
to deliver this superior work to our clients.
Not to mention that artists were probably happier
to not be back in an office full of the heat
and loud machine noises
of servers sitting under their desks.
Yeah, I completely agree Karla.
I remember one
of the first project we worked on
during the pandemic where we used
Azure Virtual Scale Sets
to replicate a single image across 500 nodes.
We used the HBv2-series VMs, and these were spread
over Ireland, the Netherlands, and United States.
There's no way we could have delivered that project
without that broad footprint.
All of our artists
around the globe experience the same low latency
and a high performance they've come to expect.
You know, that's just an awesome transformation, right?
Going from creating work, despite technology limitations
to innovating and creating amazing work
because of the technology and specifically
that global cloud based infrastructure, you know,
that's really at the heart
of what digital transformation is all about.
And I hear that constantly from customers.
Now enabling a remote workforce has been so important
over the last few years.
And in many cases that has generated additional benefits
like the ones you mentioned.
Jeremy in addition to improving the work environment
and helping Jellyfish recruit
and employ people globally,
cost effective computing power via the cloud can help
with that efficiency and compute performance.
What's your experience been with that?
And how has it impacted the business?
Well, that's one of the really great advantages
of moving to the cloud is
that you always get the latest hardware, you know,
lately we've been using the HB 120s
and the HB 60 VM SKUs.
These are armed with the newest AMD EPYC processors
and we've used them for rendering.
The performance that we got
out of these chips
was absolutely colossal.
However, I'd say the most impactful thing that we've tapped
into on Azure is the high-performance compute
or HPC platform.
Azure HPC Cache and Azure VM Scale Sets gives us a ton
of agility and flexibility, which is helping us deliver
projects that require massive computational resources.
In fact, on the last project that we worked on
we talked up about 90,000 processor cores
with Azure Scale Sets on the HBv2 series VMs.
This was coupled along with Azure vFXT
and the Azure Spot VMs.
By doing this, it actually helped knock 80%
off the rendering cost when
taking these workloads to the cloud.
To keep the latency low
we use Azure ExpressRoute to really minimize
and optimize that network connectivity.
This helped manage our storage all in a secure environment
and it kept everything under one roof,
so there was really no need for any replication.
You know, that's what I love about Azure.
It's a cloud that's built for HPC.
You get optimized compute network,
and storage resources that can really unlock
a whole new level of value and versatility.
And HPC is such a wide range of use cases.
We see customers using it to rapidly iterate
on product design to reduce time-to-market,
or simulate vehicle engineering
or even accelerate insights from health research.
Now, you've mentioned security a few times.
There has to be a certain level
of confidentiality that's involved when you're working
on motion pictures and similar projects.
I mean, keeping the details
of those highly anticipated films top secret
to preserve the surprises is critical.
You know, when you made the decision to move to the cloud
were there special security features you considered
and how did you overcome any concerns
that you might have had?
Well, certainly Erin, protecting intellectual
property is a huge priority
for any studio to be eligible for certain projects.
We have to be accredited by organizations
like the Trusted Partner Network,
which often follows rules
from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
When we first started virtualizing the studio in 2016,
Azure was the first hyper-scale, multi-tenant cloud service
platform to successfully complete a formal assessment
by the MPA and comply with their best practices
because Azure is certified by the MPA
and customer data is stored in a lockdown environment,
in many ways, our data is even more secure
than it was on-premises.
Karla, it's a great example of how moving
to the cloud can help strengthen your security posture.
Now, moving to the cloud can also help
with scalability, right?
No matter the industry,
the amount of compute capacity
it takes to run a business is gonna vary
from time to time.
For example, you know,
mission-critical workloads may need to run non-stop,
whereas other applications can handle those interruptions.
You know, what does flexibility give you
in terms of business impact
and what does that translate to Jeremy?
So what a studio scales up to work
on a large feature film invest in like hardware, software
and the recruitment of hundreds of artists.
When the project is complete
and the studio scales back down, it is still committed
to that really expensive and specialized hardware.
At that point, studios can either try
and get maximum utilization out of that hardware investment
or offer the flexibility offered by the cloud solutions.
Studios are all competing for a small pool
of top talents from across the globe.
But if they're restricted by on-premises capacity
they can be forced to turn
down big projects because they're not able
to scale their infrastructure swiftly and efficiently.
That's exactly right Karla.
With Azure service flexibility, we could put the needs
of the production first, hiring the best creatives
for each task, no matter where they live geographically.
And when the project is over, we simply shut it off.
We aren't stuck with on-premise hardware investments
that consume air conditioning, square footage,
power and so on.
All this otherwise would be underutilized waiting
for the next production.
That sounds like a game changer for Jellyfish
but also for the industry. You know,
on demand cloud resources are enabling so much
more agility these days.
And it's inspiring for me to see how our services
can also help IT become just as flexible
and adaptive as the people that they're supporting.
Now, we've talked
about how virtualization has improved many pieces
of the animation and visual effects process.
How has technology really
enabled innovation at jellyfish? Jeremy.
We are in a creative industry,
while producing the highest quality of work is paramount,
the art that inspires the work is equally important.
Because of the way these projects are released and promoted,
we are often, you know, working and gets imovable deadlines
which could put a lot of pressure
on the artist to speed up the entire creative process.
Using things like burst rendering and Azure
we've been able to push the deadlines to the absolute limit
and leave more time for the creative process.
Being able to burst
to the cloud immediately significantly decreases the amount
of waiting time we face during the rendering process
while increasing the iterative ability that we have.
We've given the equivalent
of additional 70% capacity of our own datacenter
which helps us scale up massively at a moment's notice
without any long term CAPEX commitments.
These are such great points Jeremy, and you know,
the concept of deadlines putting pressure on the quality
of work is something I think everyone can relate to.
We all want to be more agile
and the cloud can help us respond to big challenges,
like the ones we've experienced over the past two years.
Now that you've gone through your own transformation,
I'm curious, what would you say to leaders
in similar industries who are considering
moving their business to the cloud?
Well, what it comes down
to is the artists that this technology is serving
and the benefits that it brings to them.
They're able to focus on their best work instead of worrying
about how long it's going to render complex shots
like running water or hair.
And when the outside world sees this work
and what they've produced,
I think they think it's akin to magic.
But what they don't recognize is that it takes a lot
of hard work and dedicated talent that goes
to producing these visuals that audiences fall
in love with and connect to.
So we want to make sure
that our teams have better lives and they're able to focus
on what they love without any additional stress.
And that's what truly makes our work shine.
Well, as someone who benefits
from the magic, it's a delight
every time I get to experience new animated film.
So thank you for your work.
And Jeremy, Karla,
it was wonderful to have you here on the show.
I can't wait to see the exciting projects
that Jellyfish Pictures gets to work on in the future.
Thank you so much.
It's been great.
Thank you, Erin.
Now don't forget to check out the other segments
of this episode of Inside Azure for IT.
We have Anita Ramanan and Viktor Veis
from the Microsoft Azure Quantum team coming to talk
about the project they worked on with NASA.
And we'll also chat with Alex Oelling,
the Chief Digital Officer at Volocopter.
Now for all our videos, deep dives
and skilling content, head to Azure.com/InsideAzureforIT.
I'll see you next time.