9 Tips for Rendering in the Google Cloud

9 Tips for Rendering in the Google Cloud

1. Pick your Zone

Knowing your zone can help you control how fast your data is transferred to and from the cloud, how much you pay for transfers, which equipment may be available to you, and even your environment's stability.

Your data transfers more quickly when it's closer to you just like driving your car from one spot to another. Since all cloud providers offer their resources by geographic region, you should start by looking at the region you are in or that is closest to you. Within Google regions, they offer zones, and you can select zones within a region that may be physically closer to you. The closer you can get, the faster your data will transfer and the less it will cost to complete those transfers. And if you have to transfer data from one cloud resource to another, know that transferring between zones in a region is cheaper than going across regions.

Learn about the zones available to you as it can affect the hardware and services available to you. Certain zones have Ivy Bridge or Haswell processors where others don't. In addition, zones may have different quotas on the available services like firewalls, IPs, image storage, etc.. Last but not least, for maximum uptime, Google highly recommends having instances spread out to several zones in the same region because zone maintenance and outages should be expected.

2. Pick your Machine Type

Different machine types can offer a varying amount of processors or RAM which may render different applications more or less efficiently. It's best to do a set of test renders of your typical work on several different types to find the sweet spot in terms of price and performance.

For scale, look at Instance Groups. You can define a template for your instance image, so adding more processors to your standard render farm image is as simple as increasing the number of instances for that template. You can even set the instances to scale up automatically as you need additional resources. Instance Groups automatically load balance between the resources in the group, and if an instance crashes, it will automatically reboot and pick up where it left off.

3. Leverage Preemptable Instances

If you are scheduling render jobs that can afford the possibility of being paused or stopped for a period of time then Preemptible VM instances are a great bargain, running at a much lower price. By using these instances, you can save, on average, between 30 - 50% of the hourly cost for rendering instances. You can save quite a bit of money across one or more projects, but with some added risk since there is no guarantee that the instance will be not be pre empted.

LINK:	http://www.pipelinefx.com/9-tips-for-rendering-in-the-google-cloud/...
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