We Are Royale's rendering pipeline was tied to physical servers that couldn't flex with production demand. ASCENDING migrated the agency's Thinkbox rendering workload from on-premises infrastructure to a scalable, secure AWS environment, giving WAR cloud-based rendering capacity without disrupting the on-premises workflow its digital artists relied on.
Background
We Are Royale (WAR) is a renowned creative agency known for its innovative work with clients including Riot Games, Sony Entertainment, Pokémon, and Acura. WAR sought to migrate its Thinkbox rendering workload from on-premises infrastructure to AWS, with the primary goals of enhancing scalability, improving performance, and reducing the operational cost of maintaining physical servers.
The Challenge
WAR's on-premises rendering infrastructure was constraining both its production capacity and its cost structure.
- Scalability: WAR needed a solution that could dynamically scale resources to handle varying workloads, particularly during peak rendering times.
- Performance: Ensuring high performance and low latency for rendering tasks was critical to meet client deadlines and maintain quality standards.
- Cost efficiency: The agency aimed to reduce total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for frequent hardware upgrades and maintenance.
- Security: Protecting sensitive client data and ensuring compliance with industry standards were top priorities.
Why ASCENDING
WAR selected ASCENDING for its extensive experience designing secure, scalable, and cost-efficient AWS solutions. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with a proven track record and a comprehensive approach to assessment and implementation for Media and Entertainment customers, ASCENDING gave WAR confidence that the project would be handled professionally and efficiently.
The Solution
ASCENDING's engagement extended WAR's rendering environment to the cloud, then layered in the infrastructure improvements needed to make that environment scalable, secure, and cost-efficient.
Extend to Cloud
- ASCENDING conducted a detailed Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) to evaluate WAR's current infrastructure and identify potential challenges, including collecting server data, right-sizing servers, and building a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis.
- ASCENDING adopted a non-disruptive migration strategy that let digital artists keep their on-premises environment for ongoing rendering work.
- To optimize performance and cost efficiency, ASCENDING introduced an overflow solution that seamlessly shifted large-scale rendering tasks to the cloud, ensuring project deadlines were met without compromising workflow continuity.
- Users connect over a VPN to on-premises Thinkbox Deadline and AWS Portal Service running in a virtual box, submitting jobs to on-prem servers as before.
- When jobs are submitted to AWS, EC2 rendering node instances are launched on demand to process the overflow workload.
- Rendering nodes write output files and resources to Amazon S3 and job metadata to Amazon DynamoDB.
- Amazon CloudWatch monitors the rendering jobs and triggers Amazon SNS to email the admin whenever a job fails.
Infrastructure Improvement
- Compute resources: AWS EC2 instances, including GPU instances for rendering tasks, with auto-scaling groups to handle varying loads.
- Storage solutions: Amazon S3 for scalable object storage, Amazon EBS for high-performance block storage, and Amazon EFS for shared file storage.
- Networking: VPCs, security groups, and Network ACLs configured for secure and efficient network management.
- Data encryption: AWS KMS employed for data encryption at rest and in transit.
- Right-sizing and pricing models: Cost-optimized instance types and pricing models, such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, recommended based on utilization patterns.
The Outcome
The migration gave WAR a rendering environment that scales with production demand while cutting the cost and overhead of managing physical servers.
- Enhanced scalability: WAR now benefits from a highly scalable environment that can efficiently handle peak rendering loads without compromising performance.
- Improved performance: The optimized infrastructure significantly reduced rendering times, enhancing overall operational efficiency.
- Cost efficiency: Migrating to AWS led to substantial cost savings by eliminating the need for frequent hardware upgrades and reducing maintenance costs.
- Security and compliance: Robust security measures ensured the protection of sensitive client data and compliance with industry standards.
