This document discusses Industrial Light & Magic's move to a cloud-based workflow for visual effects production. Some key points include replacing the file system with a new publishing system and globally available graph database on Cassandra to store all project data. Their backbone uses Mesos and Docker for flexible deployment anywhere. The future of content creation may involve applications as services on Mesos with low latency. They have learned that anything is possible and the future is bright for reimagining the VFX workflow.

2. Everyone keeps
talking about the
cloud.

3. Cloud benefits
➔Flexible Rendering
➔Globally Available Data
➔No more maintenance
➔Work anywhere

4. Cloud challenges
➔Cost
➔Unknown tech
➔Workflow changes

5. What if we could
start over?

6. Our Project...

7. Backbone: Mesos + Docker
➔Deployable anywhere
➔Already used at scale
➔Allows us to focus on VFX logic

9. Getting rid of the file system
➔Removes bottlenecks
➔Required a new publishing system
➔Have to optimise downloads

10. Organising the data
➔Must be globally available
➔Graph DB on Cassandra
➔Allows us to model ALL our data in
one place

11. Content creation… as a
Service?
➔No more workstations
➔Applications as services on Mesos
➔Latency sensitive

13. What’s next?

14. Talk to us
jvanns@ilm.com
acarey@ilm.com

15. What’ve we learnt
➔Anything is possible
➔It’s not just about rendering
➔The future is bright

16. Tech Stack
Git (+LFS)
Docker
Mesos
Marathon
Consul
Mesos-Consul
Rexray
Cassandra
Titan
Tinkerpop
InfluxDB
Grafana
VirtualGL
TurboVNC
Ansible
Varnish
Boto
Angular JS

17. Join Us
jobs.lucasfilm.com
londonrecruitment@ilm.com