If you’re new to AWS Portal we recommend starting here. If you’re new to Deadline we recommend starting here.

AWS Portal Cost Structure

AWS Portal is made up of many components, each with their own cost. To help you understand where your bill is coming from, we’ll outline these different components and how to understand their pricing.

Deadline Licensing

Deadline Workers 10.1 and later are not required to have a license when running on an AWS EC2 instance. For older versions of Deadline see the corresponding documentation version.

AWS Portal Components

AWS Portal is composed of many different AWS services, each with an associated cost. Below we list the six different cost components for AWS Portal that make up your bill.

Note

Once AWS Portal is setup, you can use AWS Billing And Management to help understand your monthly bill for AWS Components.

Spot Fleets

These are the collections of EC2 Spot Instances that you’re running. Your Spot Fleet has an associated target capacity and a maximum amount you’re willing to pay per instance hour. You can view the current price of your Spot Instances in the AWS Portal Panel in the Deadline Monitor. For the majority of customers this will be the largest portion of the bill.

Note

The actual amount you will be charged is the Spot price at the time your Spot Instances are running, which will be less than or equal to your maximum price per instance.

Note

Linux instances are billed per second of usage, while Windows instances are billed per hour.

For more information on how Spot Fleets work and their pricing, head over to the Spot Fleet documentation.

Infrastructure

AWS Portal infrastructure is an instance that needs to be running to render with AWS and consists of several AWS services that act as the gateway to your AWS render nodes. Due to this complexity we’ve built a pricing tool, that estimates the cost of your infrastructure running 24/7 for a month. To use the pricing tool, follow these instructions:

  • Open the Deadline Monitor and, in super user mode, navigate to the AWS Portal panel and login.

  • Open the Create Infrastructure dialog by clicking on the + button in the top left-hand corner of the AWS Portal panel.

    ../_images/AWSPanelDefaultPlusHighlighted.png
  • You’ll then be greeted with the following dialog:

    ../_images/AWSPanelNewInfrastructure.png
  • Clicking on Estimate Monthly Infrastructure Cost will take you to a website that estimates the cost of your infrastructure.

Note

This is the monthly estimation for the cost of your infrastructure with the assumption that it is running 24/7. This may or may not reflect your actual usage.

S3

As part of the asset transfer system in AWS Portal, we have an S3 bucket that’s used as a cache for your assets and render outputs. Up-to-date prices are available on the S3 pricing page.

Note

Currently, the S3 bucket is created by Deadline, but it must be manually deleted from your AWS Console.

Software Licensing

You’re able to use your existing floating licenses with dynamic licensing mode or you can use Usage-Based Licensing from the Thinkbox Marketplace.

Egress

The act of transferring data (ie. assets and render output) “out” of Amazon EC2 also has a cost associated with it. Tiered pricing information can be found on the EC2 Pricing page by navigating down to the Data Transfer section.

Cloudwatch

This is where your AWS Portal logs are stored. Logs are deleted after 60 days by default. You can change the duration by right-clicking on a Completed Infrastructure and selecting ‘Log Retention Policy’.

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You can find up-to-date prices on the Cloudwatch pricing page.

Next: AWS Portal FAQ >>