Differences between Spot Event Plugin and AWS Portal

Deadline offers different solutions to enhance the render capacity on the Render farm by integrating Amazon EC2 instances. It uses the Spot capacity on Amazon EC2, which is spare compute capacity offered at discounted prices. AWS Portal and Spot Event plugin are the out-of-the-box solutions available with Deadline that are used to integrate with AWS.

Spot Event Plugin is an automated Event Plugin which scales cloud-based Amazon EC2 Spot instances dynamically based on the queued jobs and tasks in the Deadline database. The plugin triggers periodically to monitor submission or completion of work categorized to specific Deadline groups. It does not deal with asset synchronization, license forwarding, and does not come with pre-defined Amazon Machine Images. However, its major benefit is that it scales the farm automatically up and down based on the content of the Deadline queue. We have a documentation to help you setup Spot Event Plugin.

AWS Portal connects and extends your local on-premise Deadline farm by providing its own network, a connection to that network from the local on-premise Render Farm, and a File Server with an Asset Transfer solution to/from AWS cloud nodes. You can launch render nodes with rendering software pre-installed and customize with your own software, including an option that only contains the Worker. AWS Portal requires you to launch Spot Fleets manually and has the option to shut down after N minutes of idle time, then you can relaunch the spot fleet when needed. Here is a documentation help on setting up AWS Portal. We also have a YouTube playlist on a step-by-step video demonstration of the AWS Portal Setup.

If you have questions regarding Spot Event Plugin/AWS Portal or run into any issues while setting up these solutions, reach out to Thinkbox Support and we would be happy to help.