Studios are Going Nimble

As more and more companies realize the benefits of remote work and make investments to empower a more flexible workforce, the Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) market has seen renewed interest. DaaS has been around for over a decade. Only recently has it started to see some traction in our industry.

So, what is Desktop-as-a-Service? As the name implies, DaaS provides users with a workstation (and often the associated utilities like networking, storage, software, etc.) over an internet connection for a service fee. The only thing the user needs is an access point, which can be any computer or internet-connected device. In the media production industry, the adoption of DaaS has been slow since artists often need real-time high quality visual feedback that wasn’t possible to deliver until recently. However, with the latest advancements in computing power, streaming algorithms, and broadband speeds, this barrier is starting to vanish and service providers are taking notice.

All major cloud computing providers are now offering DaaS graphics workstations with Amazon going even further and launching a dedicated solution for studios earlier this year. AWS Nimble Studio is a full cloud-based studio solution that provides cloud-based graphics workstations coupled with high-performance flexible storage and a scalable render farm. This means studios can support a distributed workforce and recruit the best talent wherever they are without the need for a centralized location. The workstations are no slouches either, with up to 64 CPU cores, 256 GB of memory and 8 NVIDIA RTX GPUs, these are some serious machines.

Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and others also provide cloud-based graphics workstations but none with a full studio pipeline solution quite like AWS yet.

Learn more about AWS Nimble Studio and other cloud-based graphics solutions on the links below.

AWS Nimble Studio
https://aws.amazon.com/nimble-studio/

Microsoft Azure for Media and Entertainment
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/industries/media/

Google Cloud for Media and Entertainment
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/media-entertainment