Fans of popular animated series and features have likely seen the handiwork of Bardel Entertainment. Headquartered in Vancouver, BC, the 2D, 3D, and hybrid animation studio has worked with industry leaders, including Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, DreamWorks, and Warner Brothers to create imaginative primetime programming for all ages as well as content for streaming platforms, since 1987. Bardel recently overhauled its pipeline for cloud optimization with an eye on the future, tapping cloud consultants and AWS Advanced Partner, IMT Cloud Services, to help spearhead the implementation on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Led by Bardel Vice President of Technology Arash Roudafshan, the studio’s pipeline upgrade serves as a foundation for its expansion into more feature projects and to enhance multi-site collaboration. Considering Bardel’s fast-paced episodic production schedule and small engineering team, Roudafshan opted to bring in DDL to design and manage the transition. With this approach, the Bardel teams collaborated, tested and approved the new pipeline in less than a month. The new hybrid technology system was fully operational in four months.
Building for the future
“Working with IMT Cloud Services helped us put pieces of the puzzle together quickly, efficiently, and securely with TPN approvals in mind, so we’re well set for the future,” shared Roudafshan. “Using Terraform, we built a new account and org structure from day one, rather than having to undo decades of legacy hierarchy first. We were able to go to market much faster, and since it’s built with an automated backend on AWS, we can now scale as our needs grow.”
IMT cloud architects helped Bardel implement a multi-account AWS environment based on workstations and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), rendering, networking, and shared services. They centralized networking and connectivity on-premises using a 10GB AWS Direct Connect network connection with multiple private virtual interfaces (VIFs) for redundancy, connected to a Direct Connect gateway peered with the virtual private clouds (VPCs) across its AWS accounts.
