Autodesk Platform Services
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Massively Scalable CAD Configurators
By
Ashish Shete, Divya Sharma
Let's understand the CAD configurators first!
CAD configurators have been around in the industry since CAD software vendors started to provide Macro recording and provide APIs for customization.
Exposing low-level functionalities through various programming interfaces helped companies build configurable products that helped them get a competitive advantage.
Configurators provide an easy and efficient way to configure products as per the requirements. However, they lacked cost-efficiency as they were still tied to desktop CAD software and its licensing policies.
Thanks to recent developments in hardware technologies and browser standards, product configurators are now fully cloud-hosted, browser-based web applications that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from any location and on any device.
Thanks to recent developments in hardware technologies and browser standards, product configurators are now fully cloud-hosted, browser-based web applications that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from any location and on any device.
Can you imagine how a serverless CAD configurator can scale up massively to address the peak-hour needs of industry while staying low on budget?
The CCTech engineers made it possible with Lambda (an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services) and Forge (Forge is Autodesk's cloud development platform that allows you to integrate Autodesk SaaS products into your workflows and/or to embed some of the components into your own web or mobile applications).
Moreover,
Moreover,
- An SQL database will be used for managing projects and user logins.
- All CAD operations will be performed on the Autodesk Forge.
- The application will be hosted on an AWS virtual server instance.
- The front-end web application is written in a pure client-side framework and hosted on a content delivery network (CDN).
- The backend APIs are hosted on scalable serverless functions.
- The database used is a fully managed, scalable, and globally replicated one.
- The HPC jobs are totally scalable.
Ultimately, we achieved a highly accessible and scalable CAD configurator, made possible using Forge and serverless cloud services.
- Running costs are extremely low as you will only pay for what you consume.
- No maintenance, as the application is completely serverless.
- Reduction in time in the development of newer features.
About author
Ashish Shete
Ashish Shete has been building CAD softwares for over 10 years. He has been part of development teams who created applications for shipping, Oil-field exploration, Aerospace, and Automotive domain. He developed his interest in programming playing with AutoCAD drawings and AutoLisp while still in college. He made programming his career and went on implementing features like Oil well completion, Walk-through, animation recording, and playback and has led teams of motivated programmers so far. He has grown to be a proponent of agile software development practices and claims to have seen both the good and ugly sides of it. Currently, Ashish and his team are the go-to guys for any queries on Autodesk Forge platform in CCTech. Ashish took a break from his work a few years ago to explore the world. He went to Europe to get a master's degree in Automotive engineering. He traveled whenever he got a breather from the studies; well, it could be another way around as far as we can tell. Ashish considers himself a technology enthusiast and a cinephile. He records his thoughts on his blog and frequently writes about his experiences on Quora.
Comments