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.
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,
- 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.
