Planning a Pipeline

As you come into planning a pipeline you're going to be in one of two positions, either building a new pipeline from scratch, or replacing an existing pipeline. Whichever of these it is you need to be prepared to ask a lot of questions, at a minimum of yourself. Hopefully these questions will lead you to informed decisions.

Being prepared for this is especially important when you're coming from another operating system as there will be significant changes you need to make - from large scale workflow issues down to your choice of application for some tasks. It may seem I'm putting undue emphasis on this, but if you are not prepared to make changes then you are better off staying with what you have. Everything new comes with a learning curve, so now assuming that you've decided you are prepared to undertake any learning necessary let's move on to the first question you should ask yourself.

Why? That is either why am I building a pipeline, or why am I replacing my existing one. You need to be noting down specific issues here, "I want something better" won't cut it. Some typical reasons that lead people to consider a linux pipeline are improved scalability, more customizable, more efficient resource usage, lower total cost of ownership. These should either be listed as tasks you need to achieve (such as automated cloning), or capabilities you need to have (such as increasing processing capacity quickly and easily).

Why not? As important as the reasons you need to look at moving on are the reasons holding you back. Much of people's concerns here are applications. I'd encourage you not to list them as applications, but tasks which you need to perform, whether that's texture painting, image editing, compositing, 3d modelling or something is. It will be far more productive to list them as tasks or capabilities rather than applications, though do note your current application as well as hopefully you'll be able to run it on linux, making it that much easier to fulfil those tasks.

Now you've got a list of tasks and capabilities that you either need or desire for your new pipeline. Take a look through the tasks and capabilities sections and hopefully you'll find them addressed. If not, please drop me a line and I'll add an article discussing it.