Arch Platform Technologies
Arch is a company which provides cloud workstations to visual effects (VFX) companies. When a VFX company gets a big special effects contract, they may expand their workforce and supply of workstations. A graphics workstation can be very expensive, and upon completion of the big job, the machine may have depreciated. Arch allows VFX workers to log in to cloud workstations which can be created, started, and stopped at will. I worked on their cloud platforms and their website.
Industry-wide Layoffs
At the start of 2020, the film industry slowed down significantly, and unfortunately I was let go.
The technology
They used Ruby on Rails backends with React frontends in monolith codebases. There were many of these codebases. There was container orchestration with Docker Compose for development & deployment. The testing was very comprehensive and rigorous. Our backend was tightly integrated with serverless functions, in particular AWS Cloudformation, which spun up & down the machines. This was a very hectic sort of deal, because you are spinning up secure machines, connecting them to the correct block storage, watching for errors & reporting them, and then updating the frontend. Passing around secure keys using an AWS key manager was also intensive. Each step produced arcane errors, initially. This kind of work is not at all for the faint of heart.
