*Edited – We have found an issue with the update and we will play it safe by extensively testing the fix over the next week by moving the update to March 14^th.

Carl Bass, in his recent blog post on ‘how and why we are building Fusion” outlined why data management and collaboration are foundational to Fusion 360. To continue executing on that vision as discussed in this blog post and deliver a highly scalable and performant solution, the February Fusion update has core changes to the Fusion 360 system architecture. Here is a preview of why, what the improvements are and what to expect.

Stepping back a bit, we think of design data as consisting of several key constituents. Model geometry, tool paths, renderings, simulation studies, and other attachments are one aspect of a design. Another equally important aspect is the meta data such as relationships, versions, comments that describe the design in greater detail, and captures the decision tree on how a design evolves.    Capturing and modeling this meta data allows the support of many workflows such as version management of design edits and management of alternate design studies through branching & merging (think of software source control or “git” for Design). In the Fusion team, we refer to this as Work In Progress Data Management (WIP DM).

With the coming release of Fusion, we will be introducing significant changes to Fusion Cloud Service architecture that lays a strong foundation on which we can build an environment that is rich in WIP DM. As part of this change, we are introducing the Autodesk Work In Progress Cloud Service which is designed to model and manage complex relationships that are associated with a design. The service is highly scalable, highly available and optimized for performance. Another important change in the February release is significant improvements to the Fusion Object Storage Service. Taken together, these changes will result in immediate benefits in the way of performance gains and high reliability in the Fusion upload and download data pipeline, and allow the Fusion team to deliver rich DM workflows in subsequent releases.

These system architecture changes will require a database migration. We have been working on this project for over six months and have paid close attention to the system design as well as data migration to ensure that these changes will not result in disruption to your data or your workflows. We will start the deployment process next Saturday (March 14^th), earlier than usual around 6:00 AM PST and will conclude around midnight PST. During this time you can continue working offline but less data created during the downtime will help with the data migration process. We know this downtime is longer than usual but we ask for your patience as we deploy these important improvements.

We are really excited about this change as it helps us improve stability, scalability and performance of the data upload/download pipeline and address some of the issues you have highlighted in the forums. Additionally, it lays a strong foundation to deliver rich and transparent data management tools.