Batch

Why you need batch cloud computing

Batch processing began with mainframe computers and punch cards. Today it still plays a central role in business, engineering, science, and other pursuits requiring running lots of automated tasks—processing bills and payroll, calculating portfolio risk, designing new products, rendering animated films, testing software, searching for energy, predicting the weather, and finding new cures for disease. Previously only a few had access to the computing power for these scenarios. With Azure, that power is available to you when you need it, without a massive capital investment.

Cloud enable cluster applications

Azure Batch runs the applications you use on workstations and clusters today. It’s easy to cloud-enable your exe and scripts to scale out. Azure Batch provides a queue to receive the work you want to run, and executes your applications. Describe the data that need to be moved to the cloud for processing, how the data should be distributed, what parameters to use for each task, and the command line to start. Think about this like an assembly line with multiple applications. Azure Batch makes it easy to share data between steps and manage the execution as a whole.

Imagine running at 100X scale

You use a workstation today, maybe a small cluster, or you wait in a queue to run your jobs. What if you have access to 16 cores, 100 cores, 10,000 cores or even 100,000 cores when you needed it, and only had to pay for what you used? With Azure Batch you can. Avoid the bottlenecks and waiting that limit your imagination. What could you do on Azure that you can’t do today?

Tell us what to execute

At the core of Azure Batch is a high-scale job scheduling engine, available to you as a managed service. Use our scheduler in your application to dispatch work. Batch can also work with cluster job schedulers, or behind the scenes of your SaaS service. You don’t need to write your own work queue, dispatcher or monitor. Batch provides you this as a service.

We’ll take care of scale for you

Azure Batch takes care of starting a pool of compute VMs for you when you’re ready to run a job, installing applications and staging data, running jobs with as many tasks as you have, identifying failures and re-queuing work, and scaling down the pool as work completes. You have control over scale to meet deadlines, manage costs, and run at the right scale for your application.

Deliver Solutions as a Service

Azure Batch enables your processing to happen on demand, not on a pre-defined schedule. Let your users run jobs on the cloud when they need to. You can easily provide them a solution with Azure Batch, and manage who can access it, how many resources they can use, and ensure requirements such as encryption are met. Rich monitoring helps you know what’s going and identify problems. Detailed reporting helps you track usage.

Learn how Towers Watson delivered its Risk Agility FM insurance solution using Batch

Rendering made easy

Run your rendering jobs in the cloud using Azure Batch. Avoid the complexities of managing resources and reduce the time needed to complete your jobs. Check out the set of samples that enable you to use Azure Batch together with Blender, a free open-source 3D animation suite which supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation and motion tracking, even game creation. Whether you’re an individual or a studio, you can rely on Batch for photorealistic rendering, fast rigging, amazing simulations and game creation. Azure Batch provides the resources needed to render in a realistic timeframe to meet project deadlines.

Learn more about how to use the samples

Check out the samples on GitHub