Expediting Digital Workflow with OpenStack

In today's software-defined economy, supply chains develop digital assets and applications that involve not only an enterprise's employees but also a mix of vendors, contractors and even clients.

DigitalFilm Tree, a leading post-production company for TV and film, illustrates innovation at work by moving raw footage through a workflow involving stakeholders worldwide. Producers, directors, editors, and video effects companies examine and process footage on mobile devices the same day it was shot - with extremely tight turnarounds and can’t-miss deadlines. It’s a compute and storage intensive mission-critical workflow powered by OpenStack using a careful orchestration of multiple public and private clouds.

Maximizing efficiency and service to studios

DigitalFilm Tree demonstrates how OpenStack clouds help fill the gap between existing workflows and emerging requirements. For production and post-production processes, they uncovered ways to use OpenStack (specifically Swift, Nova, Keystone and Neutron) to maximize efficiency and provide better service to studios while handling workload fluctutations.

DigitalFilm Tree needs to scale for a 2-3 month period for the pilot season, then scale back down. Some projects are much larger or more intensive than others, due to format (4K vs 8K video) or complex special effects requirements. DigitalFilm Tree also doesn’t always know when shows will start or stop. Leveraging public and hybrid cloud allows DigitalFilm Tree to adapt to change at will, effectively creating a new business model by instantly augmenting their workflow.

Workload and data portability, though essential, isn’t enough.

DigitalFilm Tree’s cloud, running OpenStack Identity Service (code-named Keystone), acts as an identity provider for all the collaborators in the workflow. With Keystone, collaborators can easily use the best-fit cloud for their tasks. Theoretically, DigitalFilm Tree and other enterprise's workflows can use any OpenStack cloud to augment their available resources. With OpenStack, the workflow-owning enterprise uses one credential set across multiple clouds and maintains a single point of access for everyone involved in the workflow, simplifying and enhancing security.

Workload portability and federated identity are important features that convey technical benefits, but it’s important to realize that they both support a particular kind of adaptability that’s a result of widespread OpenStack availability. That adaptability is the core reason why DigitalFilm tree, its vendors, and its clients enjoy substantial business benefits.