Microsoft Cloud Rendering Azure Batch - Blender Plugin

Hi Guys,

Have anyone tried the Microsoft Cloud Rendering platform Azure? It looks pretty good with competitive pricing against AWS and Google Cloud. The main benefit is that they are developing a free plugin for blender.

Some information below:

Plugin - being rewritten here

1 Like

Hmm, interested to try this out. I’m pulling my hair out trying to get brenda to work correctly so I can render an animation. If this works and is just as cheap then i’ll be the happiest guy ever.

Is it competetive against AWS compared to “on demand” nodes or compared to the “spot market”?

VERY SUPERFICIAL comparison:

[TABLE=“class: grid, width: 600”]

Provider
GPU
USD / h

aws g3.4xlarge
4x nvidia tesla m60
0,143USD / h (theoretical “spot” price)

azure NC24
4x nvidia tesla k80
0,825USD / h (theoretical “reserved” price)

[/TABLE]

Tesla m60 (aws) > tesla k80 (azure)

There are alot of differences between those two to begin with.

Edit: Better comparison…

Yeah, seems like Aws is not only a nose length ahead.

How does that compare against renderstreet ?.
Once i had a custommer who paid for my/his animation there around 190$ just to get it delivered in 1 hour

  • 32 thread Dual Xeon E5 series
    * Quad GPU NVidia® Grid™ K520
    They also have a 50$ subscription plan where, if i remind correctly you get
    unlimited blender time on 2 servers, unless they have priority custommers, but over 100 servers they are fully into rendering.)
    Well they are blazing fast.

Well, aws c3.xlarge devices consist of Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80Ghz (4 threads).
Given those are equivalent to renderstreets, you’d need c3.8xlarge for a fair comparison.

I believe g2.xlarge consist of mentioned K520. But you can only get g2.2xlarge as lowest gpu tier.
32 Dual Xeon E5 series + 2x K520 = c3.8xlarge + g2.2xlarge

So, again… very superficial:[TABLE=“class: grid, width: 650”]

Device
USD / h

c3.8xlarge
0.207USD / h (theoretical “spot” price)

g2.2xlarge
0.077USD / h (theoretical “spot” price)

[/TABLE]

This is a best case scenario, which most likely will never occur, and if - only for a short time span.
Those prices fluctuate greatly.

For a more reliable cost calculation, lets take a look on “on demand” prices:
[TABLE=“class: grid, width: 650”]

Device
USD / h

c3.8xlarge
2.064USD / h (“on demand” price)

g2.2xlarge
0.772USD / h (“on demand” price)

[/TABLE]

There might be some marginal extra charges for storage, data transfer etc.
Also they are dependant on region, Server OS, etc…

But yeah. around 3USD / h. believe it or not.

Hmm… there appears to be something called Low Priority on Azure Batch which seems to be similar to to AWS spot market. I am not sure what the difference between Azure and Azure Batch is, though.
They offer a Xeon E5-2673 v3 with 16 Cores for $0.16/hour or several different E5-2667 v3 with 16 cores ranging from $0.35 to $0.515 per hour.

AWS on the other hand offers a E5-2666 v3 with 36 virtual Cores (which I guess means 18 real cores with Hyperthreading). The spot market price in my experience is usually around $0.35 to $0.45.

I don´t know how these different Xeon machines compare to each other but it seems that Azure is at least in the same league as AWS when it comes to price.

This is in case you are interested in CPU rendering. Personally I allways render on CPU on AWS because it is quite a bit cheaper.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/batch/

Rendering on AWS is probably cheaper because services like Renderstreet usually use something like AWS or Azure.

I use AWS for rendering all the time. It is great because it is cheap and very scalable. The largest batch of machines I have ever rented were 50 machines with 36 threads and 50 machines with 16 threads. That are 2600 threads or 1300 cores rendering for you for only about 30$ an hour.
And if you need more you just get more. You could just as well get 200 or 300 machines.

I know I keep repeating myself but the open source nature of Blender which allows me to install it on as many render nodes as I want to is the single most important feature Blender has.

And it is not only render time that is saves. It also saves optimization time. Back in the days when I worked with 3ds Max and VRay I´d spent hours or even days optimizing my scenes just so that it would render faster. Now, with cheap rendering power i don´t care about optimizing at all. I just throw cheap cpu power at it and save a lot of time and money.

1 Like

Anyone get the plugin to work? I can’t seem to make it work.

Well, not necessarily :slight_smile:

Rendering on our RenderStreet One plan ($50/month) is one order of magnitude cheaper than any cloud service if you use it to its potential. Even if you would get a single server per month, that’s $50 for 720 hours, so $0.07/hour. But the average user sees more than that, so if we do the math for 2 or 3 servers, that’s $0.035 and respectively $0.023/hour.

Then there’s our Studio plan, which offers a very good value for those who render larger volumes (over 500 hours/month) or have larger projects. Not as cheap as a DIY cloud rendering, but in the ballpark (if you count all the additional charges for the cloud, like storage and bandwidth) and with a lot less effort.

And there’s a very important difference, too: we are offering support, and a good one at that. Which helps our users achieve a 99% success rate in delivering projects.

That being said, I agree that every artist or studio knows best what’s the right solution for them. Just wanted to make sure you guys are aware how things work with our service.

Enjoy the weekend,
Marius

That sounds like a very good deal if you have to render projects constantly.
For me that is not the case. i usually have maybe one project per month or every two months and render most of the project in the end. So I need a lot of computing power for an hour or two on perhaps two or three days every month or every two months. If I understand the 50$ plan correctly you get one very fast machine for one month (or 720 hours) but you couldn´t get 360 machines for two hours for the same price.

Then there’s our Studio plan, which offers a very good value for those who render larger volumes (over 500 hours/month) or have larger projects. Not as cheap as a DIY cloud rendering, but in the ballpark (if you count all the additional charges for the cloud, like storage and bandwidth) and with a lot less effort.

And there’s a very important difference, too: we are offering support, and a good one at that. Which helps our users achieve a 99% success rate in delivering projects.

Heh, yes, I agree, the support can be worth a lot. Setting up a DIY cloud can be a bit complicated.

You are right, the One plan is better suited for constant rendering. It’s not a single machine, though. For instance, the average for the past month was somewhere between two and three machines simultaneously. Makes it cheaper than just the power cost of running the same number of servers at home or in the office in most countries :slight_smile: We’ve had a few short films rendered this way, too.

For jobs with quick turnarounds on a budget, there’s the Studio plan, which works really well in this kind of scenario.

Can’t seem to get this add on to work. Whenever I try to install it, it says pip module missing despite it already being installed.

I failed to render my project with Azure, so I just checked the VM image that Azure supplies.
I found it contains:

blender --version
Blender 2.68 (sub 0)
	build date: 2016-12-17
	build time: 10:16:03
	build revision: unknown
	build platform: Linux
	build type: Release

Th windows-based image seems to contain the newer version (2.79)

I managed to render an animation with azure batch, but at the time (3-4 months ago) they didn’t have an image with 2.79 ready and I didn’t manage to create my custom image with it. I am not sure if in the meantime they updated the version of blender on the image templates they provide.

The plugin didn’t work for me, I think it was outdated for the newer versions of blender and it felt like it wasn’t being taken care of since some times.

That said the azure batch worked really good and aside from price comparison it is light years ahead of amazon+brenda. For how much I love the work they did with brenda, it is extremely basic. It can work for the occasional render, but in my opinion if you are looking for a more “production proof” solution, azure batch is the way to go. It is much closer to what a real render farm software is. Before anyone eats me alive, not saying it is like a real render farm manager, but it will provide all the basic functionality to manage a good amount of render job efficiently.