Case Study: Autodesk achieves accelerated PaaS rollout and simplified app deployment with Mesosphere

How Autodesk Cloud Platform is using Mesos to jumpstart its PaaS plans

Autodesk, a global leader in 3‑D design and engineering software with over $2.5 billion in revenue, needed a way to accelerate delivery of new cloud services (visualization, simulation, analytics and collaboration) without forcing developers to manage where services run. With production services split across AWS and private datacenters, the company wanted an abstraction layer to remove VM provisioning and infrastructure-level APIs, improve resource utilization and control costs—so it evaluated Apache Mesos as the foundation for a standardized internal platform and future external PaaS.

To prove the approach, Autodesk built a Mesos-based Event Streaming Service (using Marathon, Docker, Ochopod, ZooKeeper, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis and more) deployed across four AWS regions. The new stack is in production, scales easily (anticipated clusters up to ~30 machines), and cut deployment time from weeks to a few simple steps. Mesos delivered strong decoupling, greater reliability and operational simplicity, prompting consideration of Mesosphere DC/OS for company-wide rollout and potential expansion to big‑data frameworks and an external PaaS for third‑party developers.

Autodesk

Stephen Voorhees

Director of Engineering for Cloud Platforms