MakerBot: Expanding access to desktop 3D printing via the cloud
About MakerBot
MakerBot, a Stratasys company, is a leading U.S. desktop 3D printer manufacturer that serves businesses and education. MakerBot also owns and manages Thingiverse, the world’s largest online 3D printing community.
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About SADA
SADA, Google Cloud Premier Partner and 2020 Google Cloud Partner of the Year - North America, helps organizations maximize the power of Google Cloud solutions by providing exceptional services for IT infrastructure modernization, application development, workplace transformation, and data analytics.
MakerBot migrated its SQL and Kubernetes environments to Google Cloud with the help of SADA, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, reducing IT costs and management while enhancing its 3D printing innovation.
Google Cloud results
- Eliminates infrastructure management demands to drive efficiency in a lean DevOps team
- Enables cloud-based 3D printing capabilities that expand access to schools, small businesses, and individuals
- Creates stability across applications, services, and websites with zero downtime post-migration
- Accelerates innovation through auto-scaled IT infrastructure and services
- Migrates 500 TB SQL database with no business disruption
Reduces Kubernetes costs 30 percent monthly
3D printers and their related software come with the promise of reshaping everything from construction to healthcare through innovative and affordable methods of creating new objects. Today, students in classrooms, engineers in manufacturing facilities, and others are using 3D printing technology to turn imagination into reality through rapid prototyping of new physical creations.
MakerBot—which was founded on the idea that everyone could be an innovator—was the first company to offer a mass-market desktop 3D printer for individuals. Since its launch, the company has increasingly served educators, delivering printers to primary and higher education schools to support learning science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) courses.
“We had a lot of early success serving consumer markets, but we decided to turn our focus toward education several years ago,” says James Franz, VP Operations at MakerBot. “Teachers and students can benefit immensely from having 3D printing in their classrooms. We’ve worked hard to make that a reality for more schools.”
With more of a foothold in education, the company then turned to professionals in manufacturing, engineering, and beyond a few years later with the support of its parent company Stratasys, which has operated in industrial 3D printing for three decades. The goal was to offer smaller companies and individual engineers, creatives, and others 3D printing capabilities previously only found in massive industrial operations.
To keep costs down, accelerate development, and create a platform that was highly accessible to a range of people, the company chose to work with Google Cloud and partner SADA.
“We saw GKE as the natural replacement for all of our EC2 instances and our own Kubernetes cluster because it could eliminate the need for us to manage IT.”
—Erik Ahrend, Lead Cloud Software Architect, MakerBotCreating more cohesive IT frameworks
MakerBot had long relied on piecemeal IT infrastructure and services that linked several cloud vendors’ products along with on-premises components. As the company scaled up and simultaneously tried to keep its IT costs down, it knew it needed a more unified approach to IT management.
“We were using too many different services, and our approach to Kubernetes was particularly problematic from a cost and management perspective,” says Erik Ahrend, Lead Cloud Software Architect at MakerBot. “We saw a real opportunity to simplify and optimize in Google Cloud.”
MakerBot chose to migrate all of its Kubernetes workloads needed to power its products and run its popular Thingiverse online 3D printing community from another cloud service to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Thingiverse is the largest 3D printing community in the world and traditionally relied on a very expensive SQL database.
“We saw GKE as the natural replacement for all of our EC2 instances and our own Kubernetes cluster because it could eliminate the need for us to manage it,” says Erik. “By migrating to GKE, we achieved 30 percent cost savings per month.” Thingiverse was at the center of MakerBot’s login ecosystem, which presented further user experience issues.
MakerBot ultimately needed a partner to streamline the migration process and chose to work with Google Cloud Premier Partner SADA. SADA stepped in to migrate the old SQL database to Cloud SQL and unify all of the diverse Kubernetes clusters into GKE.
“It would have taken at least one or two days if we tried to do this on our own,” says Erik. “That might not sound like much, but it would have been terrible for our customers because they’d be unable to print through our platform, buy the products they need from our store, or interact with us in any way. SADA quickly migrated our 500 TB SQL database with zero disruption to our business.”
SADA also helped MakerBot to begin using additional Google Cloud services, including Memorystore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, and Google Cloud’s operations suite to truly unify its IT stack on one platform. With its applications and Thingiverse website now hosted on GKE, MakerBot was better prepared to manage the business growth and continue innovating.
“The weight that’s lifted off my shoulders from not having to stand up my own Kubernetes clusters is immense. I can now just provision clusters through GKE when needed. It just works.”
—Erik Ahrend, Lead Cloud Software Architect, MakerBotGKE-powered 3D printing in the cloud
MakerBot has a relatively lean DevOps team, which made GKE especially powerful as it completely takes care of infrastructure management.
“It’s night and day,” says Erik. “The weight that’s lifted off my shoulders from not having to stand up my own Kubernetes clusters is immense. I can now just provision clusters through GKE when needed. It just works.”
MakerBot takes advantage of out-of-the-box GKE services like auto-scaling, monitoring, and Istio to manage its applications and platform with ease. The company currently hosts 99 percent of its stack and 99 percent of its web applications on GKE, eliminating infrastructure management in the process.
“As a developer, you shouldn’t have to worry about infrastructure. You should be completely focused on the cool things you’re trying to create. GKE makes that possible,” says Erik.
“Google Cloud and SADA give us the technology foundation we need to become the world’s top desktop 3D printing company. It’s ambitious but achievable given our product road map supported by Google Cloud.”
—James Franz, VP Operations, MakerBotGKE and Cloud SQL enable MakerBot to offer cloud-based 3D printing, which comes with immense demands from the algorithms, model analysis and slicing, and data transfers involved. In doing so, it accomplishes the goal of making 3D printing available to even a wider range of users. For instance, MakerBot CloudPrint, a print preparation and management solution, can be used on Chromebooks that lack the built-in power to support 3D printing. This made MakerBot one of the first companies to provide 100 percent online cloud 3D printing and slicing, directly benefiting people in business and education.
“Since migrating our environment to Google Cloud with SADA’s help, we now run much more smoothly and consistently, with no downtime in our main applications or in Thingiverse,” says James. “Between Google Cloud technology and SADA support, we have the right partners to support our lean teams as we continue to introduce new 3D printing breakthroughs.”
MakerBot is now also a Google for Education partner, opening access to cloud-based 3D printing capabilities for teachers and students through Chromebooks. Thanks to lower IT costs and streamlined management, MakerBot is now in a better position to serve the business professionals with affordable, accessible 3D printing.
“3D printing is evolving so fast that it can be hard to know what comes next,” says James. “What I can say is that MakerBot will continue to innovate to create the next big thing in 3D printing. Google Cloud and SADA give us the technology foundation we need to become the world’s top desktop 3D printing company. It’s ambitious but achievable given our product road map supported by Google Cloud.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About MakerBot
MakerBot, a Stratasys company, is a leading U.S. desktop 3D printer manufacturer that serves businesses and education. MakerBot also owns and manages Thingiverse, the world’s largest online 3D printing community.
About SADA
SADA, Google Cloud Premier Partner and 2020 Google Cloud Partner of the Year - North America, helps organizations maximize the power of Google Cloud solutions by providing exceptional services for IT infrastructure modernization, application development, workplace transformation, and data analytics.