Overview
When you manage cloud rendering with AWS Deadline Cloud, you only pay for what you use. There is no upfront commitment or minimum fee. You can choose a fully managed usage model (Service-Managed Fleets), or use Deadline Cloud with your own compute-instance workers for rendering (Customer-Managed Fleets).
You will be billed based on three components. First, the type of fleet, which is determined by whether Deadline Cloud is fully managing all of your render compute resources or if you are using Deadline Cloud to manage your own compute resources; second, the size of the AWS compute instances used to perform render processing if fully managed by Deadline Cloud; and third, the job duration.
Additionally, you can leverage Usage-Based Licensing (UBL) for popular digital content creation software (such as Autodesk Arnold, Autodesk Maya, and Foundry Nuke) and pay for use of the software only for the duration of the job. The amount of your bill is determined by the type of licenses used, the size of the instance completing the Deadline Cloud job, and the job duration.
Usage model types
Service-Managed Fleets
Service-Managed Fleets (SMFs) are render farm workers, or instances, that are fully managed by Deadline Cloud. These use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that you specify—either On-Demand or Spot Instances—managed within Deadline Cloud, and you pay for the instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes used to process Deadline Cloud jobs.
Spot Instance types
With Deadline Cloud Spot Instance types, you pay the Spot price that is in effect at the beginning of each instance-hour for your running instance. If the Spot price changes after you launch the instance, the new price is charged against the instance usage for the subsequent hour. Spot Instance prices are set by AWS and adjust based on long-term trends in supply and demand for Spot Instance capacity, but they never exceed On-Demand Instance prices.
Service-Managed Fleets – EBS pricing
Customer-Managed Fleets
Deadline Cloud can also process jobs on a fleet you have configured using your own compute, either in your AWS account or on premises. When you connect a Customer-Managed Fleet (CMF) to Deadline Cloud, you will be charged for the duration each worker in the fleet is connected to the farm. For example, if you have a worker connected for 10 hours and another worker connected for 25 hours, you would be charged for a total of 35 connected worker hours.
Usage-Based Licensing
You can use your own software licensing and not use licensing on Deadline Cloud. However, if you do need to provision a creative tool to use only during a rendering project, Deadline Cloud UBL allows you to license creative tools for the duration of their use during the processing of jobs. Note that some software, such as Houdini Engine and Houdini Karma, have tiered rates that decrease as usage increases.
Data transfer fees
You will pay AWS data transfer charges at standard Amazon EC2 pricing for data transferred out of workers running on AWS.
Additional storage costs
If you use the Deadline Cloud optional job attachments feature, storage costs are incurred and billed by Amazon S3. See Amazon S3 pricing for more details. Amazon EBS block storage costs for SMFs are billed as part of the Deadline Cloud service.
Pricing examples for Deadline Cloud
Example 1: Rendering an asset with Service-Managed Fleets and Usage-Based Licensing
Let’s say your asset includes 400 frames, each with an average rendering time of 30 minutes using Autodesk Arnold for Maya with workers that have at least 16 vCPU and 32 GiB. You defined an SMF of Spot Instances with these minimum requirements and 250 GB of EBS volumes with default throughput and IOPS. Based on instance availability, the work is completed on a combination of c5.4xlarge, c5a.4xlarge, and r6i.4xlarge.
Instances and license charges
Usage type |
Hours used |
Price |
Charge for the asset |
c5.4xlarge |
110 |
$0.1878 per hour |
$20.66 |
r6i.4xlarge |
45 |
$0.21864 per hour |
$9.84 |
c5a.4xlarge |
45 |
$0.1639 per hour |
$7.38 |
AWS Deadline Cloud UBL – Arnold |
200 |
$0.66 per hour |
$132.00 |
Storage charge
Storage usage in GB-hours = 250 GB * 200 hours = 50,000 GB-hours
Convert GB-hours to GB-months to calculate the charge:
50,000 GB-hours / 24 hours / 31 days = 67.20 GB-months * 0.10 per GB-month = $6.72
For the render, your bill will be $176.60.
Example 2: Rendering an asset with Customer-Managed Fleets on premises and on AWS
Let’s say your asset is a scene that includes 600 frames, each with an average rendering time of 1 hour using software licensed by your own license servers. Your on-premises fleet of 400 workers starts the first 400 frames and the remaining frames are rendered on AWS using a CMF of 200 m6id.8xlarge Spot Instances on AWS. The charges related to the customer-managed instances on AWS will be from Amazon EC2 and not Deadline Cloud.
Usage type |
Hours used |
Price |
Charge for the render |
CMF worker hour |
400 |
$0.015 per hour |
$6.00 |
m6id.8xlarge |
200 |
$0.4139 per hour |
$82.78 |
For the render, your bill will be $88.78.