Tag Archives: Reliability

Cloudy and/or subscription CAD still adds vulnerabilities

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Remember when I skewered the myth of CAD on the Cloud being available anytime, anywhere? Back then, I pointed out that Autodesk’s infinitely powerful cloud services had managed a grand total of 2 problem-free fortnights out of the preceding 25.

But maybe Autodesk just had a bad year or something. How are things in 2017? Thanks to Autodesk’s health check site with its History option, I can see that so far this year, the grand total of 14-day pages that show no problems is…

Zero.

That’s right, there have been no clean 100%-uptime fortnights at all this year. None. Most of the pages show multiple failures in multiple products. To be fair, the number of problems shown on each page is rather lower than this extreme example from 2016:
 

Even when there are no technical problems preventing the use of cloud or subscription software, there is always the possibility that it will simply go away. For example, NVIDIA has announced End of Life for its formerly Autodesk-integrated, once-best-thing-ever Mental Ray renderer. As of today, you can’t buy a subscription to Mental Ray standalone or the plug-ins for Autodesk products 3DS Max and Maya. As of today, the NVIDIA site still states apparently unironically that Mental Ray…

…remains the rendering solution you’ve come to count on within Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max

Maybe you shouldn’t count on it too much.

Rendering, with its potential for massively parallel remote processing on multiple other people’s computers, is a relatively attractive cloudy CAD-related function. But if that function becomes temporarily or permanently unavailable, that can make life a little difficult.

Aren’t standalone perpetual licenses a thing of beauty?

CAD on the Cloud – available anytime, anywhere except when it isn’t

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One of the multiple reasons Autodesk has failed to win over the masses to its Cloudy CAD vision is fear of unreliability. Anything that relies on using somebody else’s computer over the Internet adds potential points of failure to those already there on a standalone desktop system. These additional vulnerabilities include:

  • Your browser or thin client software fails
  • Your modem, cabling or other Internet connectivity hardware fails
  • Your Internet service provider has an outage
  • Malware or DDOS attacks on your domain or service
  • Governmental Internet service interference
  • Internet connectivity infrastructure failure
  • Malware or DDOS attacks on vendor domain or service
  • Cloud vendor infrastructure disaster
  • Cloud-based CAD software down for maintenance

I voiced my concerns about this in 2011, but technology has moved on since then and surely things are running as smooth as can be these days, right? Most computer users use Cloud services for backing up, sharing files, etc. and that seems pretty reliable, surely? How’s it going for Autodesk? Let’s ignore potential failures at your end and in the middle and confine ourselves to service reliability at the vendor end.

Autodesk kindly provides a health check site with a History option that allows you to look back in time in fortnightly steps to see how things have been going. At the time of writing, there are 25 full 14-day pages you can examine. Want to take a guess at how many of those pages show no problems?

Two.

That’s right, 92% of the last 25 fortnights have had at least one time where at least one Autodesk CAD Cloud service has been down or degraded. The most recent clean fortnight was in June last year. Most of the pages show multiple failures, such as this:
 

Some of those failures have exceeded an entire working day. How do you fancy that when you have a tight deadline to meet?

Let’s see how this compares with the service availability record of my old-fashioned standalone desktop CAD products over the same time period:
 

Hmm. Difficult decision.