Cloud-based solutions for Unreal Engine: get the white paper!

Recent years have seen a rapidly accelerating rise in the prevalence of cloud-based applications, whereby both the application itself and all of its data reside in the cloud. In this architecture, all processing occurs in the cloud and is entirely transparent to the user, who simply sees the results displayed through a user interface on their device. This deployment model makes sophisticated applications more accessible to a broader range of users, by enabling access from devices that might lack the processing power to run the computation or graphical rendering locally.

Cloud deployment also makes possible a new breed of data-heavy applications that could not function in a traditional deployment scenario due to their heavy storage and data transfer requirements. An excellent example of such an application is MetaHuman Creator, which stores its vast volume of reference photos in the cloud alongside the computing resources that run the application’s logic.

One of the core technologies that enable large-scale deployments of cloud applications are containers, a construct that encapsulates software and its supporting data in a lightweight and portable form. Containers provide a consistent runtime environment for applications, in a manner which is more efficient and cost-effective than traditional deployment technologies like virtual machines. In our white paper Cloud solutions: exploring the power of Unreal Engine containers, we delve into the results of our collaboration with TensorWorks to bring official container support to Unreal Engine 4.27. This collaboration is ongoing as we continue to work on providing container support for Unreal Engine 5 and future versions.