Most people know DreamWorks Studios for its award-winning films, television programs and video games. It’s no surprise that behind all of those crisp images lies some state-of-the-art technology.

Scott Miller, senior technologist at DreamWorks Feature Animation, joined John Furrier of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during OpenStack Silicon Valley, to discuss how DreamWorks has used the Cloud in some form for the past decade. From a Kernel-based Virtual Machine, the company moved to Hewlett-Packard Co.’s public Cloud, which it’s used as storage for worldwide collaboration for the past four years.

Now, Miller is most excited about using OpenStack as a control pane. By this, he refers to the parts of the system that allow him to schedule and compute machines, allocate a network route, and orchestrate the creation and removal of project storage. “It provides a single common way to manage storage, networking and compute,” he says. “It’s vendor agnostic, it’s self service and it’s automated.”

OpenStack agility allows for choice

theCUBE host John Furrier noted that certain elements of OpenStack “aren’t ready for prime time.”

Tim Lebel, head of Cloud product management for HP, agreed, noting, “OpenStack has found a solid foundation to build on.” He is especially interested in OpenStack for container technology and applications.

Responding to questions about hybrid Cloud, Miller explained the DreamWorks approach. “We’ve got on-premise OpenStack. We’ve got managed private Cloud and public Cloud OpenStack that’s a hybrid,” he said. Any one application may have a foot in all of those areas, or it may only be in one of those areas. The agility lets me choose.”

Miller concluded by noting the momentum surrounding HP Helion OpenStack. “Customers have moved from just trying this out and kicking the tires to starting to put workloads on it,” he said. “Our investment in the community for OpenStack is strong and will continue to grow.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE