An interesting goal to aim for, but not completely a new concept to us. It feels like a sibling-evolution to what Foundry Athera was aiming for, except in this case geared to Netflix's needs, rather than attempting to be an scaling commodity. The interesting part is going full-cloud for everything, that's the big kicker. It'll let them deploy across DC's globally so that artists in different regions can have a more optimized experience. I'm very curious about how they're handling storage, though. We push massive amounts of volatile data everyday, so they're going to have to have a central source and likely some kind of caching mechanism between DC's, otherwise there's going to be a non-trivial bottleneck with storage.
As an industry, there's been a shift to VDI (through Teradici PCoIP and similar systems) over the past several years and it is _amazing_ from an admin perspective. In studio, an artist can't tell the difference between a local physical workstation and a virtual one in the studio's datacenter. And now all of the workstations have central management consoles if needed and are located in the same spot for physical maintenance. And for remote work, there's a tad more latency and you're at the whims of ISPs, but it's very workable. In terms of bandwidth, it's not a whole lot. We're primarily supporting dual-monitor 1920x1200 and after a small handful of optimizations that maxes out at ~50-60Mbps needed by the end users, often less with the way PCoIP works.
As an industry, there's been a shift to VDI (through Teradici PCoIP and similar systems) over the past several years and it is _amazing_ from an admin perspective. In studio, an artist can't tell the difference between a local physical workstation and a virtual one in the studio's datacenter. And now all of the workstations have central management consoles if needed and are located in the same spot for physical maintenance. And for remote work, there's a tad more latency and you're at the whims of ISPs, but it's very workable. In terms of bandwidth, it's not a whole lot. We're primarily supporting dual-monitor 1920x1200 and after a small handful of optimizations that maxes out at ~50-60Mbps needed by the end users, often less with the way PCoIP works.