Michael Davie's Blog

My son has gotten interested in 3D animation with Blender, but his low-grade laptop is too underpowered to render any reasonably complex animation in a sane amount of time. He finally agreed to try out rendering in the cloud, and this post describes what I ended up building.

I came across a promising workshop from AWS that used AWS Batch to split a rendering job across multiple compute nodes. This seemed to be exactly what we needed (really, they had me at Step Functions) so I worked through the workshop steps and got the solution up and running fairly easily.

The core of the network is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. It’s an inexpensive but full-featured 5-port gigabit router, and might be the best device out there for this kind of “prosumer” use case. The five ports are connected as follows:

Unsurprisingly, our iPhones and iPads back up to iCloud. We have 200 GB of shared storage for the family as part of our Apple One subscription, which is more than enough.

Our primary MacBook has a couple layers of backup. Most of our files are continuously synced to Dropbox. We somehow have a free account with 25 GB of storage…I’m pretty sure this is the result of a Google Ads campaign I ran with my referral link back in 2010. 🤫

A few years ago I read Tim Wu’s excellent book, The Attention Merchants, which opened my eyes to the pervasiveness of what’s become known as surveillance capitalism. (The documentary The Social Dilemma also did a great job of highlighting this problem.) Afterward, I basically declared war on advertising in our family’s lives, and deployed a number of technologies on our devices and our home LAN to block as much of it as possible. Here’s our setup: