6 ms·

Why Pixar uses Microsoft's Azure

31 points by roadnottaken 16y ago

DannoHung 16y ago
Huh... was sort of hoping that the article would answer the question that it asked... "it'll be around for a while" isn't a great answer considering Microsoft's history with some of it's service platforms.
rflrob 16y ago
Anyone have a sense of who the market is for cloud-based 3D rendering? It seems like even for a small-to-medium-sized shop it's likely to be worthwhile to have a pretty solid baseline capacity in house...
- candeira 16y ago
  I would think it's the opposite: for a small-to-medium shop it makes all kinds of sense to concentrate on your core (design, animation, client development) and just rent "rendering as a service". a) If you have a small headcount, a dedicated server wrangler's salary would be better used to pay for a person with a more product-oriented profile. That's what makes the difference between you and your competition: you aren't writing your own renderers anyway. b) When maintaining your own serverfarm it can be difficult for you to have the jobs pipeline full at all times, and you can either have a lot of spare capacity sitting around between jobs, or need more horsepower during peaks. c) This also allows small-to-medium shops to tackle problems bigger than they could otherwise from a pure cashflow point of view. If you are renting rendering-as-a-service, your clients are paying for the hardware their jobs need, no need to invest, amortize, etc. Just pay an invoice coming in and an cash an invoice going out. It seems to me that these are exactly the kind of problems SaaS is designed to solve, and that small-to-medium shops can benefit from this solution more than big studios who can: a) amortize their server wranglers over bigger installations, so their sysadmin/creative ratio is lower. b) keep the rendering farm working efficiently, or even rent it out if they have lulls in work. c) afford big financial investments.
macrael 16y ago
Doesn't seem like they are actually using Azure for their films. The article says this was a proof of concept.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  Oddly, this correction doesn't appear until the middle of the article: Clarification: The RenderMan/Azure demo shown was a proof of concept.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
larrywright 16y ago
The headline is very misleading, they aren't using it at all. It was a proof of concept only.
S_A_P 16y ago
They also mention that Pixar was co founded by Steve jobs instead of purchased from George Lucas.
ajg1977 16y ago
Pixar doesn't use Azure. Pixar demonstrated a proof of concept that involved using Azure instances as virtual processors for a cloud-based Renderman farm that MIGHT be attractive for CG shops that can't afford, or don't need, a fulltime render farm. Maybe there's a shop somewhere that would be useful for, but it's certainly not going to be a Pixar or an ILM. The biggest issue with a cloud farm like this is going to be bandwidth. For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes. And you tweak and render, and tweak and render. Often the size of the data is such that when there is a need to collaborate with a different FX shop the files are sent over Sneakernet - HDD via courier or overnight FedEx. If I was to guess, I would say this is basically virtualization technology developed for in-house use (which is very useful) that has been turned into a cloud demo for Azure. Why I don't know, but Pixar won't be switching to Azure anytime soon (or ever).
- flipper 16y ago
  Would cloud farms be practical if your assets lived on the cloud as well? That could solve the bandwidth problem both with the render cycle and collaboration with other shops. Or would getting the assets there in the first place be impractical?
  - napierzaza 16y ago
    You're off the rails. If two things are "in the cloud" that can still mean they're in different data centers in opposite ends of the earth. The "cloud" just means outside your local lan. So it's the 99.999999...% of the internet you don't have any control of. Meaning you'd still have bottle necks and bandwidth issues in getting them somewhere. That's why large projects just send HDDs. This is just a proof of concept.
    - Encosia 16y ago
      I think he's implying that the bottleneck won't be an issue if (when?) we eventually have web-based software powerful enough to create those assets entirely within the same "cloud" that would eventually scale out to do the rendering.
pedrocr 16y ago
Does anyone know who actually deploys Windows based cloud/Internet-facing systems? All the big corporate IT shops I've consulted for only used Windows servers to support Windows clients and that kind of stuff doesn't move to the cloud well. All the big Internet companies (Google, Facebook, etc) deploy on Linux as far as I've seen. Most startups I've heard about deploy on Linux VPS/Heroku/AppEngine type infrastructures. I also though most of the 3D rendering was being done on Linux but maybe that is not the case. The only example I've seen of windows deployment was dpreview.com, and the comments I read from them were in the line of "it's not as bad as everyone says it is and we're familiar with the stack so we use it". Is windows a large percentage of EC2 for example? I tried to google for that but couldn't find anything.
- bkhl 16y ago
  This might help: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/
  - pedrocr 16y ago
    Thanks for that. A lot of them seem to be one-off projects. I'm still trying to find how much of EC2 runs windows but can't seem to locate that figure.
    - bkhl 16y ago
      I'm not sure if Amazon would disclose that number. It can be a sensitive number for a company to make business strategy.
  - d_r 16y ago
    I cannot see the content on that page at all without updating my Silverlight (that I just installed last month) to a new version. I love Microsoft.
- jemfinch 16y ago
  I recollect reading (no citation, sorry) that Vimeo has Windows instances running in EC2 in order to transcode video from Microsoft formats.
mindcreek 16y ago
Nothing in the article says anything about Pixar using Azure other than a proof of concept and gives no answer to the leading question. Pixar is founded by George Lucas then bought and nurtured by Steve Jobs though :)
thinkbohemian 16y ago
This article does not address the technical reasons why Pixar chose to demonstrate this proof of concept using Azure. Mad props to roadnottaken though for this other gem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744214
bsergean 16y ago
RenderMan is not the only Renderer in town BTW.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
wazoox 16y ago
There was a similar system (on demand render farm "in the cloud") on WAM!Net in... 1999? the more it changes, the more it's the same :)
wtracy 16y ago
Green Button is a startup already doing this: http://www.greenbutton.net/ http://www.greenbutton.net/ They even use Azure. They don't specifically support Renderman, though. (At least, not yet.) Like other posters here, I would be curious to know why these companies are using Azure instead of some other cloud platform.
drylight 16y ago
If a job posting to work at a Pixar server farm is anything to go by, they actually use Linux for their films.
jonhendry 16y ago
Pixar using Azure to render movies would be like Microsoft building Azure on top of Amazon EC2. Pixar and Microsoft probably could do these things, and arguments could be made for the economic advantages, but they'd be giving up opportunities for competitive advantages, and letting outsiders get them by the short and curlies in the context of crucial aspects of their businesses. I could see Pixar working with Microsoft to make Azure-hosted Renderman available for other groups doing rendered projects. For a small film project, I'd think that could be really useful. Then again, Photorealistic Renderman was in NeXTSTEP 3.0, and you could split a rendering job among local NeXT machines as easily as choosing render hosts from a GUI list. That didn't mean Pixar was rendering their Listerine commercials on 25Mhz 68040 boxes.

31 points by roadnottaken 16y ago

Huh... was sort of hoping that the article would answer the question that it asked... "it'll be around for a while" isn't a great answer considering Microsoft's history with some of it's service platforms.

rflrob 16y ago

Anyone have a sense of who the market is for cloud-based 3D rendering? It seems like even for a small-to-medium-sized shop it's likely to be worthwhile to have a pretty solid baseline capacity in house...

candeira 16y ago
I would think it's the opposite: for a small-to-medium shop it makes all kinds of sense to concentrate on your core (design, animation, client development) and just rent "rendering as a service". a) If you have a small headcount, a dedicated server wrangler's salary would be better used to pay for a person with a more product-oriented profile. That's what makes the difference between you and your competition: you aren't writing your own renderers anyway. b) When maintaining your own serverfarm it can be difficult for you to have the jobs pipeline full at all times, and you can either have a lot of spare capacity sitting around between jobs, or need more horsepower during peaks. c) This also allows small-to-medium shops to tackle problems bigger than they could otherwise from a pure cashflow point of view. If you are renting rendering-as-a-service, your clients are paying for the hardware their jobs need, no need to invest, amortize, etc. Just pay an invoice coming in and an cash an invoice going out. It seems to me that these are exactly the kind of problems SaaS is designed to solve, and that small-to-medium shops can benefit from this solution more than big studios who can: a) amortize their server wranglers over bigger installations, so their sysadmin/creative ratio is lower. b) keep the rendering farm working efficiently, or even rent it out if they have lulls in work. c) afford big financial investments.

macrael 16y ago

Doesn't seem like they are actually using Azure for their films. The article says this was a proof of concept.

brown9-2 16y ago
Oddly, this correction doesn't appear until the middle of the article: Clarification: The RenderMan/Azure demo shown was a proof of concept.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

larrywright 16y ago

The headline is very misleading, they aren't using it at all. It was a proof of concept only.

S_A_P 16y ago

They also mention that Pixar was co founded by Steve jobs instead of purchased from George Lucas.

ajg1977 16y ago

Pixar doesn't use Azure. Pixar demonstrated a proof of concept that involved using Azure instances as virtual processors for a cloud-based Renderman farm that MIGHT be attractive for CG shops that can't afford, or don't need, a fulltime render farm. Maybe there's a shop somewhere that would be useful for, but it's certainly not going to be a Pixar or an ILM. The biggest issue with a cloud farm like this is going to be bandwidth. For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes. And you tweak and render, and tweak and render. Often the size of the data is such that when there is a need to collaborate with a different FX shop the files are sent over Sneakernet - HDD via courier or overnight FedEx. If I was to guess, I would say this is basically virtualization technology developed for in-house use (which is very useful) that has been turned into a cloud demo for Azure. Why I don't know, but Pixar won't be switching to Azure anytime soon (or ever).

flipper 16y ago
Would cloud farms be practical if your assets lived on the cloud as well? That could solve the bandwidth problem both with the render cycle and collaboration with other shops. Or would getting the assets there in the first place be impractical?
- napierzaza 16y ago
  You're off the rails. If two things are "in the cloud" that can still mean they're in different data centers in opposite ends of the earth. The "cloud" just means outside your local lan. So it's the 99.999999...% of the internet you don't have any control of. Meaning you'd still have bottle necks and bandwidth issues in getting them somewhere. That's why large projects just send HDDs. This is just a proof of concept.
  - Encosia 16y ago
    I think he's implying that the bottleneck won't be an issue if (when?) we eventually have web-based software powerful enough to create those assets entirely within the same "cloud" that would eventually scale out to do the rendering.

pedrocr 16y ago

Does anyone know who actually deploys Windows based cloud/Internet-facing systems? All the big corporate IT shops I've consulted for only used Windows servers to support Windows clients and that kind of stuff doesn't move to the cloud well. All the big Internet companies (Google, Facebook, etc) deploy on Linux as far as I've seen. Most startups I've heard about deploy on Linux VPS/Heroku/AppEngine type infrastructures. I also though most of the 3D rendering was being done on Linux but maybe that is not the case. The only example I've seen of windows deployment was dpreview.com, and the comments I read from them were in the line of "it's not as bad as everyone says it is and we're familiar with the stack so we use it". Is windows a large percentage of EC2 for example? I tried to google for that but couldn't find anything.

bkhl 16y ago
This might help: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/
- pedrocr 16y ago
  Thanks for that. A lot of them seem to be one-off projects. I'm still trying to find how much of EC2 runs windows but can't seem to locate that figure.
  - bkhl 16y ago
    I'm not sure if Amazon would disclose that number. It can be a sensitive number for a company to make business strategy.
- d_r 16y ago
  I cannot see the content on that page at all without updating my Silverlight (that I just installed last month) to a new version. I love Microsoft.
jemfinch 16y ago
I recollect reading (no citation, sorry) that Vimeo has Windows instances running in EC2 in order to transcode video from Microsoft formats.

mindcreek 16y ago

Nothing in the article says anything about Pixar using Azure other than a proof of concept and gives no answer to the leading question. Pixar is founded by George Lucas then bought and nurtured by Steve Jobs though :)

thinkbohemian 16y ago

This article does not address the technical reasons why Pixar chose to demonstrate this proof of concept using Azure. Mad props to roadnottaken though for this other gem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744214

bsergean 16y ago

RenderMan is not the only Renderer in town BTW.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

wazoox 16y ago

There was a similar system (on demand render farm "in the cloud") on WAM!Net in... 1999? the more it changes, the more it's the same :)

wtracy 16y ago

Green Button is a startup already doing this: http://www.greenbutton.net/ http://www.greenbutton.net/ They even use Azure. They don't specifically support Renderman, though. (At least, not yet.) Like other posters here, I would be curious to know why these companies are using Azure instead of some other cloud platform.

drylight 16y ago

If a job posting to work at a Pixar server farm is anything to go by, they actually use Linux for their films.

jonhendry 16y ago

Pixar using Azure to render movies would be like Microsoft building Azure on top of Amazon EC2. Pixar and Microsoft probably could do these things, and arguments could be made for the economic advantages, but they'd be giving up opportunities for competitive advantages, and letting outsiders get them by the short and curlies in the context of crucial aspects of their businesses. I could see Pixar working with Microsoft to make Azure-hosted Renderman available for other groups doing rendered projects. For a small film project, I'd think that could be really useful. Then again, Photorealistic Renderman was in NeXTSTEP 3.0, and you could split a rendering job among local NeXT machines as easily as choosing render hosts from a GUI list. That didn't mean Pixar was rendering their Listerine commercials on 25Mhz 68040 boxes.