Fin now has the agility to add compute resources on the fly to meet last-minute project demands. “We can easily double or triple our compute capacity in just a few minutes,” says Spry. “That means our artists always have the capacity they need to meet big deadlines and handle all the changes that clients make to projects we’re working on.” Overall, the artists at Fin have now a better ability to meet critical project deadlines. “For our VFX team, our architecture on AWS acts as a safety net, so they can put more resources toward rendering as big deadlines approach. That means we improve overall artistic quality while keeping clients happy. We don’t have to make excuses about why their jobs aren’t going to air when they’re supposed to.”

Fin is also seeing significant savings by using Amazon EC2 Spot instances. “For us, using the cloud is definitely about cost savings,” says Spry. “We are reducing our operational costs by 50 percent by using Amazon EC2 Spot instances. We get additional compute capacity at the cheapest prices, which means we can purchase more nodes. Overall, it enables us to be more cost-competitive for our clients, while giving our artists more creative potential.”

The company now has the flexibility to schedule both on-premises servers and EC2 Spot instances through its render farm manager. “We can schedule rendering jobs to run overnight, and if something doesn’t get through on our internal network, we can put more EC2 instances on it in the morning to clear the backlog,” says Spry. Fin also has better performance on its internal network because of AWS Direct Connect. “Having a fast network link from the cloud to our data center through AWS Direct Connect makes a huge performance difference. And because Direct Connect does the heavy lifting, we didn’t have to develop our own syncing tools and possibly introduce lag time in our rendering.”

Additionally, Fin is confident in the security of its new solution. “AWS is MPAA-compliant, which is extremely important to us,” says Spry. “We also gain additional security because our instances are on a private network through AWS Direct Connect. Overall, we’ve very impressed with the security in AWS.”

In the near future, Fin plans to use additional AWS services for disaster recovery and other functions. “We will be doing a lot more in AWS going forward,” says Spry. “We’re definitely buying into the cloud. It’s the right model for our business.”