Don’t know if you guys have seen this; https://vimeo.com/177072125
Is pipelines going to be solved by the cloud? Personally I would hope so, but that latency is far from acceptable for artists to work with.
I’ve seen a preview on FMX and there was quite a discussion on cloud pipeline over the course of a few talks.
I’d say it’s certainly the future. How close to it being usable we are is tough to say. The latency is an issue, but that is only a question of paying more for getting studio on a low latency connection (certainly possible in most areas of europe) even without sohonet. There are some areas, where it probably won’t be usable even with very low latency like animation. On the other hand I’ve animated a fair few shots via teamviewer connection to the studio from home a while no super pleasant, I wasn’t slowed down too much overall.
The real issue that is a dealbreaker at this point is money. This stuff is seriously expensive. He’s talking about $30/h per machine. That is more expensive than the artist in many, if not most places.
That being said, it’s super sexy for smaller studios. We’re always looking at way to scale up and down quickly and this would be the best way by far.
Yuck. 
- Latency: Did you see the mouse hovering the file menu? Or the scanline ddrawing in the 3d viewport? I did a freelance job over a few days over Splashtop once, the lowest latency I ever experienced, and there was times where I forgot it wasn’t local. But that is a brittle illusion.
- Internet access: It chokes, it goes down, it throttles. No pipeline can survive intermittent connectivity.
- VNC: It has never worked for fullframe interactive rendering, and games has gotten a much bigger push than what Foundry is or will be even remotely able to. The problem is the vast amount of data needed to both compress, ship and decompress at interactive rates. No technology has so far managed to reduce the amount of data our sensory system needs to understand 3d space and work with graphics. We need those pixels man, or something that can stimulate us in the same way with less data.
- Web browser: No plug-ins? Why not? There are many things missing from a browser that could be added, like Wacom support, and installing plug-ins is hardly an issue. The internet transcends web browsers, why are we so dependent on Chrome/Mozilla?
It’s an obvious and naive step to take. There is enough people in the world to benefit from this taking off.
But until we stop looking to the browser for answers we are wasting time.
Kevin Baillie of Atomic Fiction talked about the same topic; https://youtu.be/ydaF0Ae5R-I?t=2689.
3 years away from cloud workstations?