How Hornet Built a Creative Production Pipeline Across On-Premises and AWS with Resilio

Hornet is an award-winning production company specializing in commercial animation, live action, and design-driven storytelling. Headquartered in New York City's Soho neighborhood, Hornet collaborates with top brands, agencies, and creative partners to produce high-end content across advertising, entertainment, and emerging media.

Hornet's pipeline runs on a hybrid workforce: in-house artists in New York, freelance talent distributed across the globe. For Head of Pipeline Gareth Porter, the job is to make sure every artist, wherever they sit, can open work files or kick off a render without waiting on infrastructure. As project complexity grew and rendering demands increased, Hornet's on-premises-only pipeline began to get in the way of progress.

When AWS Render Farms Overwhelm On-Premises Storage

Hornet's first move toward the cloud was practical: spinning up an AWS render farm to scale capacity without adding on-premises hardware. Working with technology partner Mac Tech, the team built a rendering system that could expand from 100 to more than 200 nodes on demand.

The problem was the data source for those nodes. When 100–200 render nodes simultaneously hit Hornet's on-premises origin servers for textures, scene data, and asset libraries, network connections and storage bandwidth couldn't keep up. The team needed a way to relieve that pressure without sacrificing the performance and control of local storage in everyday production work.

Extremely Long File Open Time Wasn't Sustainable

The second problem was the artist's experience. Hornet wanted to use virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide remote freelancers with fast, low-latency access to project files. But every attempt to run cloud workstations against on-prem storage hit a wall.

With unstable software that occasionally crashes and project sizes that often start at 5 TB and grow significantly larger, waiting 45 minutes to reopen a file was a non-starter. Hornet needed cloud workstations to feel local, which meant bringing data closer to compute resources.

Choosing Hybrid Infrastructure Instead of All-Cloud or All-On-Premises

Hornet evaluated both ends of the spectrum. Fully cloud-based workflows introduced unacceptable latency in file access. Staying entirely on-premises constrained the studio's ability to scale rendering and onboard global talent. Neither extreme worked for a studio operating on advertising-industry deadlines. Platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services each offer cloud-native approaches, but a pure lift-and-shift to any single provider would have sacrificed the on-premises performance that local artists depended on.

The team made a deliberate architectural decision: combine the strengths of both environments. On-premises storage would continue to anchor local production. AWS would provide elastic rendering and virtual workstations for cloud and remote workflows. A dedicated synchronization layer would automate data movement and maintain consistency across both systems, with no manual intervention required.

That last piece was the missing one. Hornet needed automatic, high-performance data replication that could move large creative datasets across a WAN at scalable throughput, and span the mixed Linux and Windows environments typical of animation and creative production.

Resilio as the Sync Layer

Mac Tech recommended Resilio Active Everywhere, and Hornet deployed it as the connective layer between on-premises and AWS. Resilio synchronizes selected project folders bi-directionally between Hornet's on-premises storage and a Qumulo file system in AWS backed by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)—an object storage service that holds the production data in a dedicated S3 bucket, organized by project and job type. Jobs are organized by workflow, eliminating manual transfers and keeping data consistent across systems.

The deployment had to handle the multi-OS reality of animation production. Linux-based render nodes access data via NFS; Windows artist workstations and VDI machines use SMB. Resilio keeps the two environments synchronized in the background, so artists and render nodes each work against the storage that's local to them, without any manual copy data steps.

The initial rollout required aligning service account permissions and sharing ACLs across operating systems—a familiar pain point in Linux/Windows hybrid environments. Working with Resilio support, Hornet standardized the configuration, and the pipeline has run reliably since.

From 45 Minutes to 2 Minutes — and a Pipeline Built to Scale

With Resilio replicating project data into AWS-resident cloud storage, workstations no longer have to reach back across the WAN to open every file. To date, Hornet has continuously synced nearly 4 million files and moves roughly 112 GB per day between on-prem and cloud—data transfer volumes that would have been impractical to maintain manually. Resilio moves only changed blocks, not full files, optimizing bandwidth and keeping AWS data transfer costs predictable.

The artist's experience changed with it. Remote freelancers across the globe now work with near-local transfer speeds against AWS-hosted VDI.

Global Talent and Cost Discipline, Without the Tradeoff

For the business, a hybrid infrastructure enabled remote work, removing geographic constraints. Hornet more efficiently scales freelance teams globally, and takes on larger, more complex projects—without expanding on-premises hardware.

That growth happens against a backdrop of strict cloud cost discipline. AWS render resources scale up only when a project demands it. Storage is tiered across on-premises and cloud-based on access patterns. AWS accounts are segmented by function to improve security and operational hygiene. Resilio's job in that economics story is to move only what's changed, so the sync layer doesn't undermine cost controls elsewhere in the stack.

Hornet runs with Resilio

For Hornet, hybrid infrastructure is the architecture that lets the studio onboard global talent, scale rendering when projects demand it, and keep the artist experience consistent whether someone is sitting in Soho or São Paulo. Resilio is the layer that makes hybrid storage actually work: automatically, at scale, across operating systems, and across the WAN.

If you're running a studio where artists are distributed, render farms are getting bigger, and data has to move fluidly between local storage and cloud compute, you've probably already felt the limits of manual transfers and brittle workarounds. Resilio Active Everywhere is purpose-built to keep production data synchronized across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments—so your team can spend their time creating, not moving files.

Ready to move faster? Schedule a demo to see how Resilio performs in your environment.