Conductor: Why We Migrated from Kubernetes to Nomad
Conductor Technologies started its digital modernization journey with managed Kubernetes on a single cloud vendor. As our business continued to expand with multicloud offerings, we began to outgrow the existing platform and eventually migrated to HashiCorp Nomad. Here is the story of how and why we made the decision, and our experience with Nomad.
As one of the largest cloud-based visual-effects rendering platforms, Conductor provides fast, secure, and efficient one-click service for a variety of movie studios, boutique VFX shops and independent artists. The Conductor rendering platform has been used to produce scenes for “Deadpool,” “Game of Thrones,” “Allied,” “Star Trek Beyond,” “The Walk,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” and many other well-known movies, television shows and commercials. The visual effects (VFX) workflow is similar to software development, and just as tools like CircleCI automate and streamline software development processes, we help artists orchestrate and schedule their rendering tasks with a simple experience so they can focus on creative work instead of dealing with complex infrastructure technologies.
We decided to adopt Kubernetes when the company started to transform its legacy system running on virtual machines to a cloud native platform. We chose managed Kubernetes on the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) because we were primarily running on Google Cloud, and as a two-person platform team, we wanted to offload daily operational tasks to a managed service.
