<p>The cost and complexity of building a render farm has typically put it out of reach of all but the most well-funded productions.</p>

<p>But the advent of cloud computing has created a new marketplace where computers in massive data centers can be rented by the hour for a cost that fluctuates according to market demand.</p>

<p>In this workshop we will explore using Python scripting to construct a Blender render farm using Amazon Web Services (AWS).</p>

<p>Our render farm will be designed with three goals in mind:</p>

<ul>
<li>Low-cost &ndash; we will explicitly design the render farm to operate on low-cost AWS &quot;spot&quot; instances.</li>
<li>Highly scalable &ndash; we will leverage on AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service) and S3 (Simple Storage Service) to scale our render farm to hundreds or even thousands of nodes without the bottleneck introduced by a controlling server.</li>
<li>Easy to understand and customize &ndash;&nbsp;typical render farm software can be quite complex due to the networking and control aspects.&nbsp;By leveraging on AWS and the Boto library, we can implement the render farm software in high-level Python code that largely steers clear of lower-level networking complexity.</li>
</ul>

<p>Source code available at&nbsp;<span class="s1"><a href="https://github.com/jamesyonan/brenda">https://github.com/jamesyonan/brenda</a>.</span></p>