OpenCue on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

OpenCue is the open source render management system that turns a pool of machines into a render farm. Artists and pipeline tools submit a job made of layers and frames, and OpenCue's scheduler decides which render node runs which frame, when, with how many cores and how much memory. It tracks every frame through the queue, retries the ones that fail, keeps the logs, and reports what the farm is doing in real time, so a shot needing thousands of frames finishes without anyone shepherding it by hand.

Originally built and run in production at Sony Pictures Imageworks and now an Academy Software Foundation project, OpenCue is designed around the way real productions work: shows, shots and departments; allocations and subscriptions that decide who gets the cores; per service memory and core minimums; and job dependencies. It suits visual effects and animation studios, virtual production teams, architectural visualisation shops, and any organisation running batch compute that has to be queued, prioritised and traced.

What this image gives you

cloudimg delivers OpenCue 1.19.1 as a complete, working farm on a single VM rather than a set of parts to assemble. The Cuebot scheduler, a PostgreSQL 16 database loaded with the OpenCue schema and seed data, an RQD render node daemon, the OpenCue REST gateway and the CueWeb browser interface are all installed, wired together and running the moment first boot completes. The client tools cueadmin, cueman and pycuerun are installed and on the path, along with a ready to run demo outline, so you can dispatch a real job within a minute of the VM booting and then scale out by pointing additional render nodes at this one.

Every component is pinned to the OpenCue v1.19.1 release and verified by SHA-256 checksum at install time: the Cuebot jar, the RQD binary, the database schema and seed data, and the source tree the REST gateway and CueWeb are built from. Nothing tracks a moving tag.

Secure by default

Upstream publishes six default secrets across its sample configuration, including a sample signing key, and none of them exists on this image. The database password, the database superuser password, the REST gateway signing key and the CueWeb session secret are all regenerated uniquely on each VM at first boot, and no OpenCue service is permitted to start until that has happened. The CueWeb interface, which upstream ships with no login at all, is placed behind HTTP Basic authentication using a password unique to your VM, generated before the port was ever reachable.

The database, the CueWeb application server, the REST gateway and Cuebot's metrics port are all confined to the loopback interface, so the only ports your network sees are the authenticated web interface on port 80 and, when you add render nodes, the farm ports 8443 and 8444. The base is fully patched with unattended security upgrades enabled.

Support and licensing

OpenCue is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and is free to use: there is no per seat, per core or per site fee. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support. Every deployment is paired with a step by step deployment guide.

This image is produced by cloudimg and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Academy Software Foundation, the OpenCue project or Sony Pictures Imageworks.