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Can Linux cloud instances (e.g. on Digital Ocean or Linode) be used for own, on-demand render farms? Are there any open source solutions for "slave" servers?

EDIT

My research didn't lead me to anything that made sense / could be used as a guide for creating own virtual farm on a cloud platform.

I was asked to help on a project and I thought that using cloud servers might be a way to render it faster and cheaper at the same time, because I can handle server-stuff.

The farm would be used for speeding up the rendering process.
The cloud machines would be connected with one workstation, which distribute the tasks between them, use their CPU power and render the video faster.

The project in question is in 3D Max and final product is an animation of medium complexity.
For example, average render speed for an i7 with 32GB of RAM is between 4-5 minutes per frame. Total video length will be under 10 minutes, meaning relatively long rendering time.

As I understood, CPU power is mostly used for rendering, so I thought that cloud instances at Digital Ocean / other similar cloud providers could hypothetically be used.

Let me know if I should post some other details as well.

Thanks!

I do apologize if this question is not within the scope of this site; I wasn't sure where to post it.

Aram Boyajyan
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1 Answers1

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Cloud services can be used if you can harness the power of the Keplar/Telsa GPUs that most providers offer as "GPU-enabled" instances.

However, these instances are significantly more expensive than their CPU counterparts. If you're rendering with the CPU, cloud instances will not do the trick as they're on generally commodity hardware and slower than that i7 you have working. You could stick a bunch of these together to make it worthwhile, but costs can accumulate very quickly.

Nathan C
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