Microsoft uses Blender as a sample application for their on-demand cloud computing platform Azure Batch.
Russell Smith writes:
Late last year Microsoft announced Azure Batch and demoed it onstage using Blender.
They've now released the code for both the client and server side on github.
From the announcement:
In October we announced the public preview of a new service called Azure Batch. This service provides job scheduling and resource management as a service and makes it extremely simple to cloud enable compute-intensive workloads to Azure. You give us the application, and we take care of the deployment, job management, resourcing, scheduling, disaster recovery, data movement, dependency management and all the other plumbing required to run jobs in the cloud.
Today we are excited to announce the release of a set of samples that enable you to run a Blender workload on Azure Batch. Blender is a free open-source 3D animation suite which supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation and motion tracking, even game creation. Blender is used by individuals and small studios for photorealistic rendering, fast rigging, amazing simulations and game creation. All these require a lot of hardware to render in a realistic time frame to fulfill project deadlines. This is where Azure Batch can help, reducing the complexity and the time needed for rendering.
