DNEG finds efficiencies with Red Hat OpenShift’s cloud-native solution.
DNEG recently teamed up with Red Hat to implement OpenShift, a leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, as a consistent global platform to speed up software innovation and improve artist productivity.
This innovative partnership also resulted in a DevOps Excellence Awards nomination! We’re looking forward to the Awards ceremony on March 14th and crossing our fingers for the DNEG and Red Hat project teams, who are nominated for DNEG’s Cloud-Native Architecture Transformation with Red Hat, under the category: ‘Best Use of Cloud-Native Technologies’!
A fundamental part of any visual effects workflow is the ability to track and manage a large volume of digital assets and their metadata, in order to assemble everything from cityscapes to jostling crowds to flowing water. At DNEG, the steady growth in artist numbers and workload over the years had brought a corresponding increase in the amount of metadata created. It was clear that our asset tracking system needed a significant architectural overhaul in order to scale to support our globally distributed team.
DNEG decided to break up key parts of the asset tracking system into microservices and manage these in containers using OpenShift. The key goals DNEG aimed to achieve included accelerating software delivery times to artists and the building of a future-proofed architecture to support innovation and next-generation demands.
Commenting on the project, Paul Salvini, DNEG’s Global CTO said:
“The biggest challenge for us was to architect a system that would be efficient and reliable at scale: managing metadata for over 100 million digital assets, while in constant use by all of DNEG’s artists around the world. Red Hat OpenShift has allowed us to fundamentally change the nature of our software, with some parts now able to be tested and deployed to production in minutes.”
Speaking about the solutions provided, DNEG’s Ian Abbott (Software Architect) and Oliver Harding (Software Infrastructure Architect), who both worked on the project, said:
“After fundamental implementation of Red Hat OpenShift to deploy our software into mainstream production, we are now moving to implementing 3scale API management to help monitor and control usage as we continue to scale up. We now have the ability to be much faster and more efficient in securely providing software to people at a global scale. Alleviating technological barriers allows artists to be more efficient and focus on what’s important.”
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From left to right: Oliver Harding and Ian Abbott