The cloud is beginning to attract more and more representatives of various industries. We have already written about the contribution of IaaS to the development of the
car market and analyzed
retail cases . Today we decided to see how IaaS helps companies in the entertainment industry. She, perhaps, like no other industry, is “honed” to the requirements of the audience. On the other hand, they are pulling the complexity of the final product and infrastructure, for example, for film production.
Here we decided to briefly highlight the three most interesting areas - video rendering, AR-cloud and IaaS for amusement parks. All who are interested, we invite under the cat.
/ photo Honeyhouse Films CC BY-SAVideo rendering
Cloud computing allows you to quickly scale the resources needed for the implementation of a project. This advantage is used in filmmaking. For example, the virtual infrastructure was used to render graphics in the movie “Life Pi” (2013). NVIDIA solutions were used
here (
here you can watch the recording of a thematic presentation).
Calculations in the cloud, in particular, were used to process more than 110 views of the sky, which the project team could see in "real time" and immediately decide how this or that movie scene should look like. For this approach, the rendering speed that can be obtained in the cloud is a key factor.
Another example of using the cloud for filmmaking is the film “Walk” (2015). For the rendering of a number of scenes, for example, where the ropewalker passes along the cable between the skyscrapers, 15,000 processors in the cloud were involved. The possibility of scaling capacities upon request accelerated the processing process by several dozen rad, and as a result, Zemeckis' idea was completely finalized in just a few months.
/ photo by Nic McPhee CC BY-SAIn addition to the speed of production, IaaS provides additional options for providing secure access to the footage. This factor is relevant not only for post-production companies, but also for all participants in the production process who are somehow involved in working with the material. With the help of IaaS, the process of interaction of all parties can be organized in a few hours using
ready-made tools of the cloud provider. They guarantee the economic efficiency of the process, an adequate level of security and the absence of the need for time and capital expenditures on its own infrastructure.
AR-cloud and GaaS
IaaS is already fully applied in the field of AR. For example, in April this year at the GamesBeat Summit, gene. Niantic Director John Hanke (John Hanke) spoke about the development of AR-based applications on the AR Cloud.
Here we are talking about comparing information about a place, object or person in real time using thematic AR-applications and specialized infrastructure. For example, VR games like Pokémon Go, which uses the AR Cloud infrastructure.
In his speech, Hanke suggested that it is the games that will become the engine in the development of the AR-cloud, because their audience is open to new developments in their perception.
/ photo by Marco Verch CC BYAnother cloud application area is Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS), based on IaaS infrastructure. Such projects as NVIDIA's GeForce Now work in this area. This is not just a streaming service, but a full-fledged provider of high-performance cloud resources.
Another example is the French startup Blade. It allows you to rent a gaming PC, which is located and serviced in the data center. Blade guarantees high-performance hardware, the convenience of such a solution, its security, and the "strict isolation of user PCs from each other."
IaaS for amusement parks
Here the cloud allows analyzing the behavior of visitors and solves the problem of monitoring physical infrastructure in real time. For example, the operator of the network of parks Six Flags Entertainment Corporation took advantage of such opportunities (every year more than 26 million visitors of the parks use the services of this organization).
The tasks that the company set itself were to standardize equipment and business processes for data processing. They were achieved with the help of virtualization technologies, which now allow you to manage the infrastructure of all 18 parks of the Six Flags network. Today, the company can track temperature fluctuations, the number of visitors, the length of the queues, the attendance of rides, the activity of food outlets and many other factors that directly affect the work of the parks and the degree of satisfaction of visitors.
NetApp storage systems are used here as storage systems, NetApp Snapshot and SnapRestore are used for backup. The amount of hourly replicated data from all the fleets of the network’s hour is more than 100 TB in compressed form. IT Network Director Michael Israel (Michael Israel) notes that the introduction of NetApp technology directly affected the financial KPI of the entire network of parks.
PS Other materials on the topic from our blog on corporate IaaS: