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Blender Cloud

Introduction

Since 2007, Blender Foundation's commercial activities are being handled by Blender Institute - to run the e-store, to do book and dvd publishing, and especially to organize Open Projects (short film, game) that support Blender development.

Sales of DVDs has substantially contributed to Blender - enabling to hire a small team of 3-5 people full time on various projects.

This type of business - basically, selling plastic! - is expected to only go down the next years. For that reason we are developing a new model to get an income with sharing and creating open data.

Cloud proposal

This document proposes a next step in Free/Open Content distribution by Blender Institute.

Blender Cloud is a web based service developed and provided by Blender Institute that allows people to access the training videos and all the data from the past open movies. It will allow to browse assets and scripts, and might even offer file hosting, file sharing and project management tools in the future.

The targets of this project are several:

• Help and support Blender development
• Explore new ways to distribute and market Open Content
• Share the advanced functionality for collaborative production that will be developed during the Gooseberry Open Movie project

Where closed software tools "move to the cloud" as a way to control their users and software even more, we can experiment and investigate open source cloud alternatives that bring real benefits to its users and developers.

Blender Cloud is going to host and distribute only Open Content: as CC-by or CC0.

Project feedback

The cloud project has been added to our developer.blender.org website, there you can follow progress and give feedback on the plans!

https://developer.blender.org/project/view/36/

Features

Allow access to Open Movie Workshops (Trainings) in:

• high resolution streaming
• download
• allow to order them on physical support via the e-shop too

Access to previous and running Open Movie Projects, including:

• production files
• tutorials and documentation

Blender Cloud integration directly in the Blender software, to provide direct access to:

• the previously mentioned assets and presets
• software updates

Access to Blender assets and presets, such as:

• shaders
• compositing setups
• scripts

Project creation and management:

• versioning
• file management
• collaboration tools

Technology

The main backend framework is Flask (Python package), extended with:

• Flask-Admin
• Flask-SQLAlchemy
• mysql-python
• Pillow

We use a MySQL database for storage. This can be changed anytime since we use SQLAlchemy.

Given the intense traffic generate by video streaming, we plan to rely on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). One important aspect to investigate is whether CDN links can be bound to the authentication system. A robust tracking system will be developed to keep bandwidth usage and content access under control.

Authentication

This is a very important aspect of the system. How do users register and access the various platforms and services offered by Blender Cloud? The idea is to setup a SSO (Single Sign On) system, called Blender-ID, that provides authentication.

Several solutions are possible:

• Rely on a 3rd party OpenID authentication provider or become a provider ourselves
• [Mozilla Persona] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona
• Develop our own simple authentication system

Subscription

The subscription system is responsible for managing which content a member can access to while logged in with his Blender-ID, as well as managing members payments. The online payment ecosystem is complex, since there several variables to keep track of, which can be summed up with:

• which payment gateways are available in the member's country
• how the member prefers to pay for his subscriptions (online or wire transfer, automatic or manual)

Timeline

The initial Flask-based training access in being developed. Next coming up we have:

• authentication system (feedback on how to implement this is very welcome)
• subscriptions
• open movie projects
• generic assets

We plan to release a first version of the Cloud for testing at the beginning of February. A link to the code repository and a discussion board to collect feedback will be available soon!