Coda: The Cultural Effects of Queueing at Disney Animation

When we began designing the new queueing system for Walt Disney Animation Studios, we had a simple goal in mind: Take some shell commands, run them on some remote machines, and return the results. What we thought would be a six month project evolved into an eight year journey that helped revolutionize the culture at our studio, and built a world class queueing system capable of executing millions of tasks per day. Three key features of Coda, automated render wrangling, localized job priority, and advanced desktop rendering, have helped to encourage a culture of trust and collaboration, both amongst the different shows competing for queue resources, and between the production and technology organizations in the studio.