Concepts and terminology for Deadline Cloud

To help you get started with AWS Deadline Cloud, this topic explains some of its key concepts and terminology.

Budget manager

Budget manager is part of the Deadline Cloud monitor. Use the budget manager to create and manage budgets. You can also use it to limit activities to stay within budget.

Deadline Cloud Client Library

The Client Library includes a command line interface and library for managing Deadline Cloud. Functionality includes submitting job bundles based on the Open Job Description specification to Deadline Cloud, downloading job attachment outputs, and monitoring your farm using the command line interface.

Digital content creation application (DCC)

Digital content creation applications (DCCs) are third-party products where you create digital content. Examples of DCCs are Maya, Nuke, and Houdini. Deadline Cloud provides job submitter integrated plugins for specific DCCs.

Farm

A farm is a where your project resources are located. It consists of queues and fleets.

Fleet

A fleet is a group of worker nodes that do the rendering. Worker nodes process jobs. A fleet can be associated to multiple queues, and a queue can be associated to multiple fleets.

Job

A job is a rendering request. Users submit jobs. Jobs contain specific job properties that are outlined as steps and tasks.

Job attachments

A job attachment is a Deadline Cloud feature that you can use to manage inputs and outputs for jobs. Job files are uploaded as job attachments during the rendering process. These files can be textures, 3D models, lighting rigs, and other similar items.

Job properties

Job properties are settings that you define when submitting a render job. Some examples include frame range, output path, job attachments, renderable camera, and more. The properties vary based on the DCC that the render is submitted from.

Job template

A job template defines the runtime environment and all processes that run as part of a Deadline Cloud job.

Queue

A queue is where submitted jobs are located and scheduled to be rendered. A queue must be associated with a fleet to create a successful render. A queue can be associated with multiple fleets.

Queue-fleet association

When a queue is associated with a fleet, there is a queue-fleet association. Use an association to schedule workers from a fleet to jobs in that queue. You can start and stop associations to control scheduling of work.

Step

A step is one particular process to run in the job.

Deadline Cloud submitter

A Deadline Cloud submitter is a digital content creation (DCC) plugin. Artists use it to submit jobs from a third-party DCC interface that they are familiar with.

Tags

A tag is a label that you can assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and an optional value that you define.

With tags, you can categorize your AWS resources in different ways. For example, you could define a set of tags for your account’s Amazon EC2 instances that help you track each instance’s owner and stack level.

You can also categorize your AWS resources by purpose, owner, or environment. This approach is useful when you have many resources of the same type. You can quickly identify a specific resources based on the tags that you've assigned to it.

Task

A task is a single component of a render step.

Usage-based licensing (UBL)

Usage-based licensing (UBL) is an on-demand licensing model that is available for select third-party products. This model is pay as your go, and you are charged for the number of hours and minutes that you use.

Usage explorer

Usage explorer is a feature of Deadline Cloud monitor. It provides an approximate estimate of your costs and usage.

Worker

Workers belong to fleets and run Deadline Cloud assigned tasks to complete steps and jobs. Workers store the logs from task operations in Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Workers can also use the job attachments feature to sync inputs and outputs to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.