Amazon Nimble Studio Custom Configuration Introduction

Amazon Nimble Studio empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud. Studios can rapidly onboard and collaborate with artists globally and create content faster with access to virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across the AWS global infrastructure.

With the release of custom configuration components, administrators now have the flexibility to configure instances with the use of PowerShell scripts for Windows, and shell scripts for Linux instances, tied together by sets of custom parameters. These configurations can then be added to Launch Profiles for easy retrieval.

Studio Resources

Nimble Studio provides a set of resources that can be added to the studio for artists to access via Launch Profiles. Several pre-configured resources are currently available, including: file storage, compute farm, license service, machine images, and Active Directory. With this release we added the new custom configurations feature: customers can add resources not covered, as well as the ability to run custom scripts during instance, system, and user initialization.

Custom configuration component

Custom configuration info

Region

Name of the region the studio is deployed in. This is pre-filled with the correct value.

Custom configuration name

The name associated with this configuration. This can later be referenced in Launch Profiles.

Custom configuration description

Script perameters – tagging

Parameter name

A description administrators can attach to this new component.

The name for the parameter. This can later be used as a key variable in the initialization scripts.

Parameter value

The value of the parameter. This will be used in the scripts and replaces the name (key) during runtime.

Administrators can add as many parameters as needed to each custom configuration. This provides an easy way to inject variables into scripting and makes replacing values easy.

Initialization scripts section

In this section administrators define the Windows PowerShell or Linux shell scripts to run either during system initialization time and/or user initialization time.

Security groups table

Security groups allow administrators to open new ports on the instances that are needed to perform certain operations on the instance. This could include opening ports for custom file storage support or ports needed to communicate with license servers.

Examples

1. Custom config to hide the windows server network wizard after user login

In this example we will create a custom configuration component that sets up an Active Directory Group-Policy-Object to hide the Network Wizard which is shown when a user logs into a Windows Server instance.

Script parameters sections

2. Setting the DCV Server Priority

In this example we create a custom configuration component that can increase or decrease the process priority for the NICE DCV streaming server. This can be helpful if users run very CPU-heavy applications and gives the streaming server a higher priority.

Script parameters section

Initialization scripts

Conclusion

In this blog post, we showed how the new custom configuration component enables Nimble Studio administrators to set up and control additional properties of their streaming workstations. We explained existing component types and the benefits given by the new custom component. We also explored settings administrators have in the new component and how to use them, and we demonstrated two sample use cases.

More information about this topic can be found in the Nimble Studio documentation.

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