Netflix teases desktops-as-a-service offering aimed at VFX creators | Hacker News Reader

Netflix teases desktops-as-a-service offering aimed at VFX creators

theregister.com

36 pointskiyanwang19 comments

My partner works in VFX, and watching them work during quarantine, the experience was poor to say the least (aside from the speed from which they went from "remote work is not even an option", to it working).

This seems like a good step forward, but I think the real potential is in building the frontend software to be as lightweight as possible, to run on any computer, and just put the previews rendering on the cloud (so for example, instead of wasting bandwidth streaming ui elements / desktop interface you could just send actual useful data)

Edit: another good point of this model, is that for example, occasionally workstations turn off / stop responding / etc.. I don't have much IT experience and know how much you can mitigate that, but they had to often had someone still on premise to fix things. Going completely cloud based would be much more "quarantine" friendly in that regard...

That's an interesting idea. I originally wanted to post about how cool the virtual CGI workstation concept was, but what might be better still, is a system / platform where an artist can do as much as they can on their local machine, and outsource requests for preview / final renders to cloud based machines, while streaming the result back to the enduser, with some amount of lag when moving cameras around a preview.

Wouldn't want any amount of lag in the modelling process though. Even disk pauses and garbage collection can prove distracting with that kind of work.

Yeah, for the 3d side of things it gets a bit trickier, vs 2d (compositing, grading, etc) where the interface itself could trivially run on anything, and you just need rendered video frames.

But even for 3d I would thing a "streaming based" 3d protocol or something would be much better than just an RDP connection

RDP connection already does all that. Essentially, it connects client PC's GPU to server's CPU. The software running on the server ain't aware, it calls regular D3D11 APIs and they just work, except for rare edge cases when it doesn't.

Netflix is famous for putting as much on AWS as possible. AWS has a desktop as a service offering, so is this competing with AWS, or is it a slightly more complete product built on top of the AWS option?

Edit: in the original blog post linked to from The Register article it seems this is not public. This would lead me to assume that it is in fact running on AWS like most of the rest of Netflix's infrastructure, and that Netflix are providing a useful distribution/configuration/potentially free layer on top. Not to down-play the importance of this, I can see this being really useful for creators.

You didn't read the article. This is a service for VFX artists who are working on Netflix titles. It's a competitive advantage for Netflix if their VFX artists can work faster than others while working remotely. These desktops won't try to compete with Amazon or the general market.

I read the article. There is nothing to suggest this is not a public offering, nor any mention of it being specifically for people working on Netflix titles.

Did you read a different article?

Edit: turns out they did read a different article, which is here[0] and does strongly imply it's not intended to be a public offering.

[0] https://netflixtechblog.com/empowering-the-visual-effects-co...

> Netflix says the service offers “virtual workstations, integrated storage and full access to secure rendering in a connected environment” and is intended to “provide collaborators frictionless access to infrastructure to meet Netflix’s demand for VFX services around the world as our library of original content continues to grow.”

So, firstly: there are two articles. The linked HN article, and the original Netflix blogpost (which is not linked here on HN, but is linked by The Register).

From the Netflix blogpost, it seems you are correct. The author of The Register article seems to have misinterpreted and is definitely discussing a prospective public offering.

The 2nd sentence you quoted implies that people working on Netflix titles will use it, but does not imply exclusivity.

The 1st sentence I don't really understand what you're reading from it... sounds like a public offering to me.

In addition to those sentences, The Register article is chock full of direct references to it being a public offering, not an internal vendor offering.

Perhaps dang or another mod can change to the source article which is less misleading: https://netflixtechblog.com/empowering-the-visual-effects-co...

Have you seen Workspaces? Have you tried to use it?

It’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever been forced to touch. I avoid it even more than I avoid Windows and other Microsoft products, which is saying a lot.

An interesting goal to aim for, but not completely a new concept to us. It feels like a sibling-evolution to what Foundry Athera was aiming for, except in this case geared to Netflix's needs, rather than attempting to be an scaling commodity. The interesting part is going full-cloud for everything, that's the big kicker. It'll let them deploy across DC's globally so that artists in different regions can have a more optimized experience. I'm very curious about how they're handling storage, though. We push massive amounts of volatile data everyday, so they're going to have to have a central source and likely some kind of caching mechanism between DC's, otherwise there's going to be a non-trivial bottleneck with storage.

As an industry, there's been a shift to VDI (through Teradici PCoIP and similar systems) over the past several years and it is _amazing_ from an admin perspective. In studio, an artist can't tell the difference between a local physical workstation and a virtual one in the studio's datacenter. And now all of the workstations have central management consoles if needed and are located in the same spot for physical maintenance. And for remote work, there's a tad more latency and you're at the whims of ISPs, but it's very workable. In terms of bandwidth, it's not a whole lot. We're primarily supporting dual-monitor 1920x1200 and after a small handful of optimizations that maxes out at ~50-60Mbps needed by the end users, often less with the way PCoIP works.

Given that Netflix has a vested interest in trying to pump out a high volume of content. Can this be a play to help comoditize the post-production costs associated?

What is the value added over connecting remotely to the office workstation? In my experience, video over RDP is terrible. Are they using a better protocol?

Maybe something similar to how Stadia and xCloud work?

(1) Reduced overhead for the company. With virtual workstations they don't have to supply and maintain a specific machine for each employee.

(2) There are many protocols that are much better than RDP for sending a high resolution display feed over the internet (such as offerings from HP, VMware, and Teradici). Also RDP has improved a lot in that regard if you haven't used it in a while.

Simple remote connection as they do now (aside from the terrible quality), gets tricky from a security standpoint: as far as I know, nothing stops you from just getting source file from the workstation to your local machine. Workstations usually have USB ports locked/disable to avoid this. I imagine this solution will also help work around this...

RDP is indeed terrible for anything involving video or 3D, but there are companies out there that specialise in much lower latency desktop streaming. As an example Parsec started out focused on allowing people to run AWS instances for gaming rather than having a beefy desktop at home, but appear to be pivoting into remote desktop access for creatives: https://parsecgaming.com/teams/

IMO: for cooperate computers desktop-as-a-service is the way to go. Of course that means maintaining two machines (possibly one in a VM.)

It's just annoyingly expensive for Windows boxes, with all of the licensing and stuff. Microsoft includes licenses for running VDI in Azure with Microsoft 365 now, but it still requires a full on-prem Active Directory setup (which you probably don't have if you are using Microsoft 365). And then on top of those licenses, you also have to get Citrix/VMWare licenses if you don't want to use Azure. It becomes more expensive than hiring a IT person to just manage all of the laptops you deploy everywhere (except in certain scenarios like healthcare).

I want to live in a world where we all have SunRays and I just plug in a card and show my session running in the cloud, but it's too darn expensive still (and everyone in enterprise is too scared to try and build one themselves since the big vendors have Microsoft's blessing when building their solutions). That one time I had a VDI at an internship, boy was it magical. Being able to walk into a conference room, type my password and show people something was extremely powerful.

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