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Server

nate_jaspernate_jasper Member Posts: 2
Hi,

I love Onshape's revisioning and branching mechanics as well as the convenience of sharing links to drawings, etc. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons as the future of CAD. Among my handful of pet peeves though, the biggest issues I have are working with ITAR material and the varying lag in usage due to internet latency.

Why doesn't Onshape offer a local server client as a service to companies? Onshape central could still push software updates and access things as necessary for maintenance, etc., but latency would be greatly reduced on that network and any company that has export controls in place has a secure server already. Anyone within the company could still make use of the important features that make working with shared CAD feasible, with no concern for data security. It would just be up to the company itself whom Onshape links are shared with, but that's already an issue with any company-server-hosted files.

I've mentioned this to the staff I've interacted with over the phone, but have had issues fully communicating the idea.
I'm open to input on why this would be a good idea or would not be feasible, either technically or economically for either party.
Also open to reassurances from Onshape staff that this feature is in the works and will be released very soon.

Comments

  • john_rousseaujohn_rousseau Member, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 392
    Hi @nate_jasper.  Thanks for your question. The number of servers that provide the Onshape service is in the hundreds. We use this many servers to provide load balancing, high availability and good performance to all of our users around the world. We also greatly increase this number of servers every few weeks while we are doing software deployments in order to provide a mostly transparent upgrade experience. By supporting all of our users on this set of servers, we can scale to provide service to our free users, our educational users (also at no cost) and still provide a very cost-effective plan to our professional users. The minimal set of servers needed to provide all the functionality that Onshape provides, even in a single geography, would be cost prohibitive for almost any company. We also leverage several technologies that AWS provides that would not be available in a local data center.

    The above server cost doesn't include the cost of the operations team which deploys, monitors, secures and troubleshoots the service around the clock.

    We definitely hear your concerns about ITAR and we will be looking at compliance options in the future. I also hear your concerns about latency, but we have many users around the globe that use Onshape very successfully at higher latencies. You should work with support if you are having performance problems. They might not be related to latency.
    John Rousseau / VP, Technical Operations / Onshape Inc.
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