My colleague James Staten recently wrote about AutoDesk Cloud as an exemplar of the move toward App Internet, the concept of implementing applications that are distributed between local and cloud resources in a fashion that is transparent to the user except for the improved experience. His analysis is 100% correct, and AutoDesk Cloud represents a major leap in CAD functionality, intelligently offloading the inherently parallel and intensive rendering tasks and facilitating some aspects of collaboration.

But (and there’s always a “but”), having been involved in graphics technology on and off since the '80s, I would say that “cloud” implementation of rendering and analysis is something that has been incrementally evolving for decades, with hundreds of well-documented distributed environments with desktops fluidly shipping their renderings to local rendering and analysis farms that would today be called private clouds, with the results shipped back to the creating workstations. This work was largely developed and paid for either by universities and by media companies as part of major movie production projects. Some of them were of significant scale, such as “Massive,” the rendering and animation farm for "Lord of the Rings" that had approximately 1,500 compute nodes, and a subsequent installation at Weta that may have up to 7,000 nodes. In my, admittedly arguable, opinion, the move to AutoDesk Cloud, while representing a major jump in capabilities by making the cloud accessible to a huge number of users, does not represent a major architectural innovation, but rather an incremental step.