Fusion 360 for Business Hybrid Cloud

[bensbenz]

In light of a recent post by @prabakarm found here

which further explains that just "storing files locally" is really not ideal considering how the entire system works, and considering there are power users of the Fusion that simply having recent data on one machine may not be enough should there be an outage I would like to propose a Hybrid Cloud solution.

Basically Fusion 360 with no cloud would suck. Its not as easy as simply having local copies of files, its just not designed that way and for many good reasons. Basically what I think would be great is if we had a Business level subscription. Included with that would an appliance, be it hardware and software, or simply a virtual appliance that would live on site, local at your place of business. Said appliance would be the middle man between you, the internet and the Autodesk cloud. As long as you were onsite at your place of business, an internet outage or cloud outage would have no effect on access to your data. Fusion would behave exactly the same as if there was no outage, because its simply talking to the appliance. When the internet or cloud came back online, all the data is synced.

This solution would have numerous benefits:

Its a local copy of your data without sacrifices in functionality
The concept is proven by many other cloud services
Client performance should be enhanced for things like autosave (we are only going as far as the local network)

Perhaps you could also leverage said appliance for offloading local sim and rendering

I know for my own business having this implemented would instantly elevate Fusion 360 in my mind as being enterprise class software and just about eliminate my concerns with my data in the cloud.

[LibertyMachine]

I am behind this 100%. The fiasco of the other day CANNOT happen again.

[roambotics_scott]

Sorry [and more @prabakarm and Carl / etc than to you], but I'm extremely unsympathetic and skeptical that there is any technical justification for why «Fusion 360 with no cloud would suck»

I get that that's long been the party line, but at best, it strains credulity (and to the extend the app actually is dependent on the cloud rather than just enhanced by it, I'd argue it's unnecessarily broken for no good reason)

[bensbenz]

@roambotics_scottHey no worries. As I understand it, the way fusion works vs your normal non-cloud connected CAD-CAM software package sort of parallels the way websites used to work and how they work now. Basically websites used to be a bunch of static pages that had to be maintained manually. Sure you could create links between things, but if you changed a resource name or location the link was broken. Due the the vast amount of content and the rate at which it changes, developers said hey this isn't feasible to manage all these links and relationships manually, lets keep track of it all in a database and let the computers do the work. Well the rest is history as they say, there is pretty much nothing on the web that works without a database server behind it.

While a gross over simplification, thats basically how fusion works. If you took away the database, you lost what makes fusion special. So how could you make some of that functionality to work offline? Well you need a database server running on each local machine. Being in IT I know what a total pain in the butt that is. Now make it also compatible with those God forsaken apple things and you have an epic challenge and a support nightmare on your hands.

I am not saying cache and some sort of offline functions should not be available with just the fusion client itself, I agree that is a must. Instead what I am suggesting is a way to offer something to those of us that would love to be able to continue using Fusion 360 in a business environment that would be both feasible and manageable. Something that would allow us to continue to use Fusion 360 in our organizations without the fear of revenue, data or productivity loss in the event there is an local internet outage or a cloud outage. Something that I have seen other companies do, and something for which the technology already exists. Lastly I think it would open many more enterprise eyes and ears to the Fusion 360 platform which have otherwise simply dismissed it as a hobbyist toy.

[roambotics_scott]

I have quite a bit of experience architecting cloud based and distributed software and they're either BSing you or they're going out of their way to do unnecessarily silly things @bensbenz

[bensbenz]

@roambotics_scottAll this is based off of a few tid bits of data I have gleamed. No one from autodesk has tried to sell me anything about how it all works. That said, while I am not a software engineer, I have to deal with and support many different cloud based systems, from EHR/EMR to Project management, Accounting, Backup, ect. All of them that have taken the hybrid approach do so using either an appliance running their server or I have to install their server on an existing one that then syncs to the cloud. NONE of them even attempt to try and squeeze the functionality onto the clients themselves. You cant think of Fusion as a normal software, its Client-Server end of story. Just like your web browser is capable of amazing things, its only capable of those things when there is a server behind it doing the work. People that want everything to work standalone, everything on one computer, probably should be looking at other software's like inventor.

[roambotics_scott]

The difference is that all of those cloud based systems you mentioned actually need a DB backend 🙂

I'm happy for someone at AD to give a technical justification, but barring that, colour me skeptical

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

@roambotics_scott Have you been to AU2016? It's not so much about the CAD or CAM. It's about connecting them all. Having the system take guesses for you, machine learning etc. So while there might not be an immense benefit now it's all looking forward.So that might mean it's not adding anything now, making it fully work outside of the cloud would cripple future development.

[roambotics_scott]

Haven't been to AU2016 but smells like pure bull𝗌hit and hot air (even without the ML buzzword).

Cloud is great. Network computing is awesome. I agree.

But make something solid that works and use it to enhance the experience when it's available.

This is not rocket surgery. Network computing has been around for decades and doing these things right has long since been solved.

Sorry @Laurens-3DTechDraw but there is absolutely zero technical reason why making it rock solid as a stand-alone program would undercut anything that they might want to do in the cloud.

[BillyBobBilly]

Using "enterprise class software" as an exemplar for good software is hardly a lofty goal.