M+E Daily

Microsoft Azure Exec: More Media Companies Moving to the Cloud, But Some Still Hesitant

NEW YORK — A growing number of production companies are moving their workflows to the cloud, but some studios remain reluctant to make the move despite the advantages provided by the cloud, according to Joel Sloss, senior program manager at Microsoft Azure.

“There is still in the production community a fair amount of hesitancy around using the cloud,” he said July 24 during a panel session called “Cloud-Scale Rendering for Media” at the Entertainment Production in the Cloud (EPIC) conference, part of the Media & Entertainment (M&E) Day at the Microsoft Conference Center.

The 2018 M&E Day also included Content Protection Summit East and Smart Content Summit East, providing M&E technology teams valuable insights into the creation, production, distribution, security and analysis of content.

“I think most of the major studios have come around to the notion that [the] cloud is the path to the future,” Sloss said. After all, increased video resolutions and higher frame rates, combined with immersive technologies, are all things “requiring more and more compute power and more and more storage,” he told the summit.

“The likelihood that especially a small production company is going to be able to house the kind of infrastructure that’s necessary is decreasing every day and every week,” he said. And resolutions will only be increasing, he said, noting that production companies are working with 4K Ultra High-Definition (UHD) today and “now it’s going to be moving to 8K.”

Workflows, Sloss also said, are increasingly moving to the cloud on an end-to-end basis.

Prior to its purchase by Microsoft in early 2018, cloud data storage company Avere Systems “started out building hardware appliances for people who were outgrowing their data centers and moving physical gear to remote sites,” Bernie Behn, Avere program manager said during the same session. The “challenge there is once you’ve separated your compute from your storage, it becomes very difficult to render at a, shall we say, efficient pace,” he said, noting his company therefore “developed a high-performance file system cache that allows you to extend your file access to a remote location.”

Once Avere “ported that actual software into clouds like Azure — and Amazon and Google, prior to our acquisition — customers were basically able to then stop buying hardware … and actually start renting it by the hour and not have to worry about the data management challenges that you would normally face when you’re trying to ship data together with your compute,” he said.

Avere, therefore, “had customers building their own private clouds eight, nine years ago,” he said. But “then the public cloud became popular and people were able to overcome some of the, shall we say, technological challenges of where you’re going to put your data and who’s going to safeguard it,” he said.
Behn added: “Once you got your render images able to run in private cloud, then you just have to feed data to them and they can run, and you can essentially render at large scales about tens of thousands of cores without actually having to manually copy data back and forth. So, that was the main value add for all of our media and entertainment customers.”

Most Avere customers were located on the West Coast, he noted. But media companies in London were facing a “space crunch” because they were no longer able to secure additional data centers in the city and started “procuring other solutions for moving their compute elsewhere,” he said.

London-based visual effects and animation company Jellyfish Pictures has been “looking at using cloud-based compute now for several years,” CTO Jeremy Smith told attendees. “We’re constantly” dealing with higher resolutions because it does a lot of work with companies including Amazon and Netflix, he said.
“Everything is now in” 4K and Jellyfish is “now looking at” high dynamic range (HDR) workflows and Dolby Digital workflows and everything else, and the requirements keep going up” as a result, he said. But, being based in London, there’s only so much “stuff that you can actually kind of like cram into a server room,” he noted, adding it’s also “very expensive buying physical servers” because, “even if you depreciate them over three to five years, that is still a risk.”

Jellyfish decided it made sense to use its “current light infrastructure” combined with Azure cloud services “when we need it,” he said. “We weren’t interested in building our own data center because essentially that means we still have to buy, we still have the rack and we still own that. And that means we have all that overhead” and also have run it, he noted.

In the past, before cloud, Jellyfish worked on a TV show that was expected to have multiple seasons but was canceled after the first one, he recalled. As a result, “we had all of this stuff sitting there that was supposed to be rendering and it wasn’t, and so we want a way of working smarter and not harder,” he said, adding: “The public cloud has changed that for us. So, if we don’t need that compute, we simply dial it down.”

Jellyfish has also been working with MESA member Teradici to use virtualized workstations, he pointed out. So, now if it has 20 freelancers for a month, “we no longer need to buy 20 physical machines” for them to work on, he said.

Today, Jellyfish artists “don’t know if they’re rendering on-prem or in the cloud and they just don’t care; they just want to get the rendering done,” he said.
The 2018 Media & Entertainment Day was presented by Microsoft, with sponsorship from IBM Watson Media, Amazon Web Services, IBM, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, NAGRA, NeuLion, Ooyala, EIDR, GrayMeta, MarkLogic, Qumulo, Avid, Cloudian, SoftServe and TiVo. The event was produced by MESA, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council.

Click here for audio of the cloud rendering presentation.