Case Study: Conductor achieves scalable cloud VFX rendering with HashiCorp Nomad

Conductor uses HashiCorp Nomad to drive industry-leading compute scale that enables VFX studios to render massive amounts of content on the cloud

Conductor, a platform for cloud-based visual effects rendering, needed a way to scale unpredictable batch workloads quickly and securely across multiple clouds while keeping operational overhead low. To support its on-demand, minute-based rendering model, the team needed a scheduling backend that could handle high-scale compute, attach customer files at render time, support licensing requirements, and give strong visibility into performance.

Using HashiCorp Nomad, Conductor built a multi-cloud orchestration layer for its render farm, with Terraform-managed clusters, custom auto-scalers, secure sandboxing, and licensing and observability integrations. HashiCorp Nomad helped Conductor go from zero to production in a month and migrate most GCP customers, while delivering measurable performance gains including a 63% faster pending-to-start time and a 42% improvement in total job completion time versus GKE in benchmark tests.

Conductor

Jonathan Cross

Lead Software Engineer