Monks.Render Cloud.

The render platform behind Metropolis, EasyJet Holidays, and the After Effects plugin — and a service that other Monks teams and external clients consume directly via REST API.

A Turborepo / pnpm monorepo houses six packages: shared types and Zod schemas; an Express + PostgreSQL gateway with nexrender HTTP integration; a React + Vite + Tailwind dashboard; a worker wrapper around nexrender-worker for the Windows AE machines; ExtendScript files for layer property targeting and the effect adapter; and custom nexrender actions for caching, GCS download, font install, media resolution, script injection, and progress reporting.

The production deployment runs on GCP Cloud Run (gateway + dashboard) with Cloud SQL for state, Cloud Storage for assets and outputs, and a Managed Instance Group of Windows Compute Engine VMs (After Effects pre-installed, spot-priced for ~75% cost reduction, SIGTERM-handled for preemption). Cloud NAT, VPC Access Connectors, and Secret Manager handle the private networking and credentials story. CI/CD via GitHub Actions and Cloud Build, infrastructure as code via Terraform.

The craft choice was treating observability as UX. The dashboard uses Socket.IO + TanStack Query to invalidate caches surgically on real events — no polling flicker. The job detail page renders a live activity log, error block, and output video player with signed URLs. The fleet control panel exposes spot-VM scaling (target count, machine type, lifecycle states) so a creative-ops lead can resize the farm without filing a ticket. A status-synthesis layer fills in fast nexrender state transitions that polling misses, so downstream consumers always see the full job lifecycle.