Running the Houdini license server in the cloud

You can run the Houdini license server (sesinetd) on a cloud instance but you have to ensure that it is a persistent instance that will maintain it's machine name. You can only serve client machines over a private network. The server cannot serve over a public-facing interface. You will have to configure a private network, or VPN.

Running a Houdini client in the cloud

You can either install your license directly to the cloud instance but you have to ensure that you release the licenses back to your SideFX portal before terminating the instance otherwise the license will be lost with that instance. Ensure that the machine has 3D accelerated graphics if you wish to use Houdini graphically. The easiest way to license a Houdini cloud instance is to have that machine use a remote license server or SideFX as the license server (login-based licensing).

Rendering services

There are 3rd party rendering/simulation service providers:

Gridmarkets

AWS Deadline cloud

Conductor

AWS Thinkbox

Once your rendering pipeline is integrated with AWS Thinkbox, you can scale rendering workloads to thousands, or even tens of thousands, of cores in minutes. You can also scale down just as quickly as you scale up, providing incredible compute elasticity and cost control.

• AWS Thinkbox Portal (small boutique studios)
• Direct Connect (larger studios)

AWS Thinkbox Portal creates a render farm, or bridges your current render farm, using AWS EC2 spare capacity, known as EC2 Spot Instance. The AWS Portal facilitates the secure communication between on-premises and AWS, handling asset transfer and software licensing. AWS Portal is the easiest way to get off the ground, since it automatically copies data from your on-premises storage to the cloud as needed. When you submit from Houdini with the Deadline plug-in, AWS grabs all the external file dependencies and uploads them to the cloud before the render (or simulation) starts. AWS Portal is a feature in Deadline and is a good tool for smaller studios.

To optimize the movement of data in production using the cloud, a dedicated network connection such as AWS Direct Connect (DX) is recommended to increase the available bandwidth and to decrease latency. There are solutions for scaling your direct network connection on short notice, up to 40GB using DX.

If you need hundreds or thousands of machines for your render farm, you may look to using EC2 Spot Instances for cost efficiency and filesystems like AWS FSx. You would need to copy your assets to the cloud with some sort of automated syncing, depending on what on-premises file server you are using. You can also sync data as you go using AWS DataSync, or if you have more time you can use AWS Snowball.