Challenge
The customer sought a scalable and cost-effective solution to replace their traditional in-house render farm, which was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and scale due to the costs of purchasing, configuring, and maintaining physical servers. The main objective was to move to a cloud-based infrastructure that would allow dynamic scaling and offer a more flexible solution without the complexities of managing hardware.
Implementation
TrackIt developed a cloud-based render farm solution using AWS services, with a focus on scalability, ease of maintenance, and flexibility. The infrastructure was defined using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) principles and stored in AWS CodeCommit, with deployment managed through AWS CloudFormation. The render farm was hosted on Amazon EC2 instances, with Deadline software deployed to handle the distribution of render jobs. Each job would trigger the creation of a new “farm” using EC2 instances defined by launch templates, which would then process the render jobs. Once the job was completed, the farm would automatically scale down to optimize costs.
List of Services Used
- AWS CodePipeline: Managed the end-to-end deployment and automation of the infrastructure and render farm operations.
- AWS CodeCommit: Hosted the infrastructure code, ensuring version control for the IaC.
- AWS CloudFormation: Automated the creation and configuration of the render farm infrastructure, enabling repeatability and scalability.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Provided monitoring and logging to track the performance of the farm and troubleshoot any issues.
Results
Before migrating to the cloud, the customer operated a small in-house render farm, which posed several challenges in terms of hardware upgrades, maintenance, and scalability. By moving to a cloud-based solution, these challenges were mitigated, as the company no longer needed to purchase, configure, or maintain physical servers.
Although the cloud-based render farm does not offer the same raw power as the in-house solution, the scalability and flexibility provided significant benefits. The cloud platform enables the company to easily scale up or down based on the demand of rendering jobs, ensuring that resources are used efficiently. While the cost of maintaining the cloud-based farm can fluctuate, the quality of life improvements, such as dynamic scaling and no hardware depreciation, outweigh the potential downsides.
Metrics
- Hardware and Maintenance Costs: Reduced capital expenditures by approximately 40-50%, as the need for physical servers and related maintenance was eliminated.
- Render Time Efficiency: Render job completion times improved by approximately 30-40% due to the ability to dynamically scale resources and distribute jobs more efficiently across instances.
- Operational Efficiency: Time spent managing hardware and infrastructure decreased by 90%, as manual intervention for server provisioning, maintenance, and upgrades was no longer necessary.
- Cost Flexibility: The ability to scale resources up or down based on job demand led to a 50% reduction in over-provisioning costs, optimizing resource allocation and minimizing waste.
- Job Scaling: The cloud-based render farm can now scale up to 100+ EC2 instances during peak rendering jobs, compared to a fixed in-house limit of 10-15 machines.
About TrackIt
TrackIt is an international AWS cloud consulting, systems integration, and software development firm headquartered in Marina del Rey, CA.
We have built our reputation on helping media companies architect and implement cost-effective, reliable, and scalable Media & Entertainment workflows in the cloud. These include streaming and on-demand video solutions, media asset management, and archiving, incorporating the latest AI technology to build bespoke media solutions tailored to customer requirements.
Cloud-native software development is at the foundation of what we do. We specialize in Application Modernization, Containerization, Infrastructure as Code and event-driven serverless architectures by leveraging the latest AWS services. Along with our Managed Services offerings which provide 24/7 cloud infrastructure maintenance and support, we are able to provide complete solutions for the media industry.