Case Study: Goodbye Kansas achieves cost-effective, scalable rendering with Google Cloud Platform

Goodbye Kansas Cost-effective rendering with Preemptible VMs

Goodbye Kansas Studios is a Stockholm-based visual effects and CGI company that produces work for film, TV, games, and commercials. Rendering is an intensive, frame-by-frame process and their in-house render farm frequently hit capacity during parallel projects or complex shots, forcing costly, cumbersome stopgap measures like renting and transporting physical servers.

To solve this, Goodbye Kansas burst to Google Cloud Platform using Compute Engine—primarily Preemptible VMs—integrated via the GCE API and organized in groups to scale up and down automatically; jobs are retried if a VM is preempted. The approach, in use since late 2014, cut rendering costs, eliminated the need for extra physical servers, allowed on-demand matching to higher RAM/CPU specs, improved storage and backups with Cloud Storage, and gave the company confidence to take on more projects.

Goodbye Kansas

Thomas Ericsson

CTO