Azure Batch updates

Since the previous update, we have added the following capabilities to Azure Batch:

• Azure Batch Rendering. At SIGGRAPH 2017, we announced the public preview of Azure Batch Rendering, which updates Batch to support cloud-scale rendering capabilities on a pay-per-use basis. You can easily create Batch pools with one or more rendering applications already installed. You have the ability to pay for these applications on a pay-per-minute basis with your Azure account, instead of using your own licenses and license server. Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, and Arnold are initially supported, with Chaos Group V-Ray coming soon. With the Batch plug-in for Maya, you can also submit a job to Batch right from Maya. See the blog post and Batch documentation for more details.
• Job task counts. A common monitoring operation is to get task counts—the number of tasks per state. There can be many thousands of tasks in jobs, and calculating counts by using the List API can be slower than required. We've added support for quickly obtaining task counts for a job. See the REST API and C# API documentation for more details.
• Exposure of ports on pool nodes so they can be addressed externally. We've enhanced network configuration to allow a list of NAT pools to be configured. You can specify protocol, ports, and network security group. See the REST API (will be added shortly) and C# API documentation for more details.

For a summary of all API updates, see the following documentation:

• REST API versions
• C# Client API versions