We are super pleased with this new Soft Tech Support Gateway option.   This option runs in a very small, efficient Linux virtual machine instance that runs within the same computer as your development environment.   The entire virtual machine instance takes just over 100 MB of hard drive space.  There are many windows apps that take more space than this.  We tested it and allowed for the virtual machine instance to use minimal machine resources of 512 MB of ram with 1 CPU core, and performance was outstanding.    We feel this is in the virtual machine space kind of like what the Pi was in the hardware space.

We continue to have real world field success in environments where VPN’s will not work, like with PLC’s that do not have a gateway address pre-configured and will therefore only talk to a local area subnet address, or in cases where there are duplicate subnet networks involved that will not route properly over VPN.

— Chester G., Chief Designer