Filed in Partner & Customer Updates
on November 5th, 2014 by Guillaume Aubuchon

OpenStack Summit Paris is the fourth OpenStack Summit for me (I’ve had the pleasure of being on stage for three of them, most recently announcing the first ever OpenStack Superuser Award).

In Paris this week, it feels like OpenStack has really turned the corner and has become a true enterprise cloud platform. 2014 is the year that OpenStack stabilizes and draws larger companies into the community.

I’ve always been a firm believer that the opposite of stability is not instability, but is in fact maneuverability. You need a balance of maneuverability and stability to make a great platform, and that’s what we’re working on in Paris for the Kilo release of OpenStack.

At DigitalFilm Tree we’re having our biggest year yet. We’re doing six television pilots and six other television and film projects on top of OpenStack. We use the three main pillars of OpenStack: We use storage to store our raw camera assets; we use Nova compute to transcode and manipulate that material and render effects; and we use networking to spin up instances in geo-located facilities, for example for editorial out in the field, in-house post production facilities or digital effects facilities that we’re working with. And Rackspace runs our entire public cloud and the entire infrastructure for our Critique video collaboration suite.

It’s our fourth year using OpenStack and our third using it in production. And for us, moving to an OpenStack platform was a reinvention of how efficient we can be as a business. OpenStack allowed us to maintain the same footprint in terms of square footage of our facility and maintain the same footprint in terms of personnel on staff, all while expanding the amount of business we’re doing.

As I said before, DigitalFilm Tree is using the cloud to save Hollywood and eliminate the inefficiencies of television and film pre- and post-production. We’re now starting to see wide cloud adoption and over the next 12 months we’ll see that story nearly completed: cloud infrastructure will be used from pre-production on a TV show or feature film all the way through distribution and broadcast.

It’s super exciting to see this story come together even further at OpenStack Summit Paris this week. Let’s all eat some cheese, drink some fine wine and do some OpenStack developing.

Check out more coverage from OpenStack Summit Paris.