Announcing the Arch Platform integration with NICE DCV

The Arch Platform is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that provides “Collaborative infrastructure-as-a-Service” on AWS for teams across all industries. The Arch Platform creates and manages powerful, cloud-based and hybrid high performance compute studios streamed performantly and securely. It uses NICE DCV, as well as several other protocols, to support workloads such as editorial, visual effects, post-production, virtual production, game development, engineering, and other collaborative endeavors.

With Arch, customers quickly deploy secure cloud facilities, including workstations, storage, render/build farms, or a security broker. These deployments seamlessly integrate with providers of digital content creation tools and workflow solutions. The Arch dashboard also integrates with on-premise hardware fleets so companies can view their compute resources in a unified portal.

Arch provides flexibility that goes beyond creative workloads and can be used by any business visualizing resources in AWS or on-premises. To securely stream these demanding workloads, Arch requires a high-performance display protocol. With the announcement of the Arch Platform’s integration with DCV, workloads now use DCV as the high-performance display protocol for secure visualization access. Arch supports other high-performance protocols; however, they have a cost associated with them. When the resources are running on AWS, there is no additional cost to use DCV as the protocol.

Using AWS and DCV to maximize the potential for a globally connected collaborative workforce

The need for high-performance computing for collaborative workloads is growing exponentially across industry verticals. Using the global infrastructure that AWS offers with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), customers can scale their business-critical workloads. Streaming creative applications running on EC2 with DCV provides a localized experience, bringing the power of AWS to the end user’s desk. DCV offers a variety of features to delight users across industry verticals. For creative users accessing DCV through the Arch Platform, many DCV features become imperative for their work. These features include 4K multi-monitor support, high-color accuracy, audio/video synchronization, up to 60fps streaming, and more.

“DCV/AWS has allowed us to offer a highly secure, easy to use connection protocol for customers at no additional cost” – Edward Churchward, Arch Co-Founder; CTO

Using dozens of AWS services, the Arch Platform helps customers build, manage, and monitor cloud-based facilities anywhere. Deployments are done directly in a customer’s AWS account so they can use their existing AWS discounts, preferred pricing, and account-level security policies. Alternatively, customers can deploy into an Arch account to have the infrastructure managed for them.

Extending the flexibility and agility of your collaborative workloads with AWS

The Arch Platform provides a dashboard that drives an orchestration engine which deploys cloud facilities in any AWS Region and in any AWS account using AWS CloudFormation. The process is repeatable and auditable. The cascading machine image pipeline is customizable with any of the provided 650+ software packages, and the platform makes it easy to install and configure DCV on workstations. This machine image pipeline also reduces the overhead associated with change management and operating system updates. The broad operating system support provided by DCV brings inherited support to your image pipelines. The Arch orchestration engine unlocks the possibility to deploy hundreds of workstations in minutes.

Developing a user and admin friendly interface to control your environment adds significant cost to your workload because of the frontend development required. However, the Arch Platform dashboard provides this interface out-of-the-box. The Arch dashboard lets you build and manage workstations, monitor your environments at scale, and manage your cloud or hybrid facilities. You can manage teams of users and groups of workstations through the interface. For monitoring, the dashboard allows you to view workstations, render consumption, and more granular metrics relating to the workstation, connection protocol, and user. The dashboard also provides both cost estimation and reporting for AWS resources.

Keeping your workload secure by default

Connecting to your Identity Provider (IdP) can be a cumbersome task when building your own collaborative infrastructure solution. The Arch Platform provides support for popular IdPs, allowing you to use your existing identity store for platform access. This inherently applies all of the security controls set on access through the IdP to your Arch Platform deployment.

The security of the content generated on collaborative infrastructure is a top priority. The Arch Platform provides this security by encrypting all of your data at rest through the use of AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). In addition, when streaming your creative sessions with DCV, you also keep your in-transit streaming traffic secure. DCV transmits only encrypted pixels to the end user, while all of the workload data stays secure in your environment.

Arch also supports hardware MFA keys and passkeys to secure web logins and DCV sessions providing incredibly robust security for the most sensitive workloads and content.

Conclusion

The Arch Platform has solved some of the most difficult barriers that come with implementing and managing high-performance compute infrastructure. Arch also offers several cost optimization benefits using Amazon EC2’s pay-as-you go billing, providing cost saving workflows that only run the resources you need. The Arch Platform keeps security as a priority so you can protect your data and resources, whether the resources are on-premises or in AWS. Arch provides flexibility that goes beyond creative workloads and can be used by any business visualizing resources in AWS or on-premises. By integrating DCV, creative end users accessing AWS resources can use a high-performance display protocol with no additional cost to the business.

To get started with the Arch Platform, visit the Get Started page.