SL Moving to the Cloud

[Dillon Levenque]

I've had both convertibles and cars with sunroofs; convertibles were better.  I'm not as crazy as Maddy and the Wisconsoners but for a Californian I probably get close. I spent a lot of time driving a Fiat 850 which belonged to a girlfriend. I remember once driving up into the hills with a friend one winter day—probably in the mid-fifties—with the top down. It was a roadster; you only put the top up on a roadster when it's raining hard. I was so enjoying the nimble handling, the sun in my face, the wind whipping around, that I said, "Isn't this great?". I got expletives for an answer and looked over to see him trying to get more of his face into his jacket. He didn't seem to appreciate the moment.

These days my ride only has a sunroof but I do use it often. Better than nothing.

 

Her Fiat wasn't quite this prettied up (it did not have chromed wheels, for instance) but it was structurally the same as this.

Edited February 8, 2018 by Dillon Levenque

[Parhelion Palou]

1 hour ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

When they say "cloud" do they mean the same cloud service that gets hacked on the weekly? The one everyones nude photos were stolen from? That cloud? If so, is that really where we want our original textures, mesh creations and what not stored? If no, what cloud service?

I assume LL will use the same service that they use with Sansar: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

As for hacking, that's really up to the people renting the service. The leaks I've heard of have been from people not securing their data or using stupid passwords.

[Callum Meriman]

On 2/8/2018 at 1:46 PM, Drake1 Nightfire said:

When they say "cloud" do they mean the same cloud service that gets hacked on the weekly? The one everyones nude photos were stolen from? That cloud? If so, is that really where we want our original textures, mesh creations and what not stored? If no, what cloud service?

Well, with the CDN that came in when we stopped serving textures from the region... those original textures, mesh creations and what not's are already there.

The cloud isn't evil, it just means incompetence is easily found. Set something up securely and it's more secure than your home.

Edited February 9, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[DarkRavenWolfie]

if it would mean a much stable/less laggy performance with good internet then Im all for it

[ChinRey]

55 minutes ago, DarkRavenWolfie said:

if it would mean a much stable/less laggy performance with good internet then Im all for it

Moving the asset servers to the cloud is definitely a good idea. It means faster content delivery for the users and presumably cheaper hosting for LL. It's surprising they haven't done more of it already. Mesh assets and textures were moved to the cloud as early as 2014 but then they seemed to have stopped and it's only recently they started to do the same to other assets.

It's a completely different story with the sim servers though.

 

On 8.2.2018 at 5:30 AM, Parhelion Palou said:

I assume LL will use the same service that they use with Sansar: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The Second Life content delivery network was hosted by Highwinds at first, today it's on Akamai. I'm not sure if Sansar is hosted by AWS these days. I think it was at first but it seems a bit strange for LL to chose different providers for the two.

[Parhelion Palou]

15 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Moving the asset servers to the cloud is definitely a good idea. It means faster content delivery for the users and presumably cheaper hosting for LL. It's surprising they haven't done more of it already. Mesh assets and textures were moved to the cloud as early as 2014 but then they seemed to have stopped and it's only recently they started to do the same to other assets.

It's a completely different story with the sim servers though.

 

The Second Life content delivery network was hosted by Highwinds at first, today it's on Akamai. I'm not sure if Sansar is hosted by AWS these days. I think it was at first but it seems a bit strange for LL to chose different providers for the two.

LL designed Sansar to run on the cloud (it is AWS); now they want to do the same with SL. Their data center is rapidly becoming antique and they figure it's cheaper to move onto the cloud then to rebuild that data center. The job will be more interesting than with Sansar -- for one thing SL has region crossings so there's a lot of CPU to CPU communication that Sansar doesn't have. They'll need to make sure that region crossings don't get worse. We're supposed to get database upgrades too.

[animats]

Remember, "the cloud" is time-sharing. You pay for what you use. Financially, SL now becomes a variable cost rather than a fixed cost. So the economics change. Minimizing the number of servers in use becomes more important. Lag becomes a profit center.

SL really is a virtual world. SL's sims continue to run even when no one is in them. They can't be turned off without breaking the world. Trains and Yava pods continue to travel through sims empty of avatars. Tugs and ferries move over empty ocean. Horses continue to graze and grow.  Tens of thousands of active objects continue to run their scripts. SL sim servers are almost a fixed load. That's not a good fit to AWS.

Compare Sansar, where resource usage is determined by the number of shards of an experience. That, in turn, is determined by the number of avatars. If Sansar needs 10,000 instances of Aech's Garage the day Ready Player One comes out, AWS can do that.

If SL moves to a pay-per-use cloud, LL will have tough management meetings over this.

[Qie Niangao]

6 hours ago, animats said:

SL sim servers are almost a fixed load.

Perhaps for small values of "almost".

Actually the sim processing load fluctuates wildly and LL's small-scale virtualization doesn't spread out that load efficiently across its thousands of regions. Hence, moving to the cloud could be enormously beneficial specifically for sim processing -- but there's sure to be some surgery necessary to remove assumptions in the code about executing on the same processor from minute to minute.

While they're at it, if it were me, I'd revisit the "region idling" approach for opportunities to more aggressively reduce processing when there's nobody around... and possibly introduce new "on demand" land products.

[Parhelion Palou]

Note this post (from back on page 2) from Oz Linden:

On 12/1/2017 at 5:06 PM, Oz Linden said:

One point we'd like to correct: Moving to the cloud does not necessarily mean that we would stop running regions without avatars in them. For the time being at least, our goal is to run SL and its regions just as we do now - full time, with a substantially similar schedule for when and how they are upgraded. Doing otherwise could, as some have correctly pointed out here, introduce problems with backwards compatibility and mobility.

Whether or not we will also be able to create new land products that are not always running, how to decide when they run and when they don't, and what the pricing might be for such offerings are among the things we've had discussions around internally, but not made any decisions about yet. The cloud will broaden what we might do in this and a number of other exciting ways, and we look forward to exploring them, but that will happen only after we've gotten the current service uplifted.

 

 

[Kadah Coba]

LL lowered mainland pricing and support got flooded with inquiries about abandoned land.  Still crazy am I?

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Kadah Coba said:

LL lowered mainland pricing and support got flooded with inquiries about abandoned land.  Still crazy am I?

We don't know how much the Lab has gained or lost by lowering prices. That flood of folks wanting abandoned land could be entirely made up of folks "spending" the additional 512 added to their Premium "bonus" tier, including some moving out of Linden Homes.

I haven't heard of a single person actually increasing their tier level to take advantage of the lower prices. (There must be some, though -- temporary land speculators, if nobody else.) 

Some reportedly became Premium and left estates in favor of the now cheaper mainland, but that shift is no win for the Lab if estates shrink as a result.

It could nonetheless be a win for the Lab even if they lost a little money on the change if it results in more satisfied tier-payers who stick around longer. 

[Rhonda Huntress]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

That flood of folks wanting abandoned land could be entirely made up of folks "spending" the additional 512 added to their Premium "bonus" tier, including some moving out of Linden Homes.

Clover and I have talked about this.  We are both premium and have 2 Linden homes at the moment. I am still pondering if 2048 sqm of mainland shenanigans is better than two separate 512 sqm protected homesteads.  Either way our housing budget stays the same.

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Clover and I have talked about this.  We are both premium and have 2 Linden homes at the moment. I am still pondering if 2048 sqm of mainland shenanigans is better than two separate 512 sqm protected homesteads.  Either way our housing budget stays the same.

There are no "mainland shenanigans" that I'm aware of, and I've been on mailand throughout my 11 years in SL, but you could test it. Between you, you have 1024 tier-free left. You could try a 1024 peice of mainland just to see how it might suit you.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

18 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

There are no "mainland shenanigans" that I'm aware of, and I've been on mailand throughout my 11 years in SL, but you could test it. Between you, you have 1024 tier-free left. You could try a 1024 peice of mainland just to see how it might suit you.

Of course there are...  By that she means, and she will correct me if i am wrong, the sheer amount of random people walking into your land, billboards all over and just randomness. There are always shenanigans going on on mainland, @Klytana isn't wrong in calling it Madlands.

[Phil Deakins]

I've been in the sim where I am now for many years, and I've encountered no such shenanigans. Mainland was unattractive  in the past, and there are no doubt still patches of the same, but with the amount of abandoned land around, much of it is quiet and peaceful.

Edited April 17, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Rhonda Huntress]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

There are no "mainland shenanigans" that I'm aware of,

I was referring to the headaches of neighbors in the wild.  Those are too many to enumerate.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

I was referring to the headaches of neighbors in the wild.  Those are too many to enumerate.

But Rhonda, Phil is the be all and end all of mainland information.. No one can possibly have any different experience in SL than him. You can't dispute his Word. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Just when I thought the Forum was getting dull. Thanks, guys!

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Yeah, well, different experience, alright... I'm living on Mainland next to a cliff to the Jeogeot Gulf, with an airport on the south side, some 512 sqm lots on the north, an Asian Vintage Rock'n'Roll club on the Northwest, a chunk of abandoned land in the West and a semi-active scripted gadget store on the other side of the sim. It's by far more peaceful than most private estates where I used to rent.

[Kadah Coba]

Zindra tends to be the mainland that typically has a lot of issues. Seems like most sims there are usually TD'd and issues with neighbors appear common.

Meanwhile on the mainland I've had for like a decade, I've basically never had an issue outside of an invisible region sized mega prim once a long time ago.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Let me have mainland wihtout premium or having to deal with a blood sucking vampire and I'll go snag me a big big piece.

[Phil Deakins]

On 17/04/2018 at 9:51 PM, Drake1 Nightfire said:

But Rhonda, Phil is the be all and end all of mainland information.. No one can possibly have any different experience in SL than him. You can't dispute his Word. 

Not all mainland, Drake, but thank you for your confidence in me I am, however, the "be all and end all" of information for the bit of mainland where I've been for many years, especially when it comes to shenanigans

[Kyrah Abattoir]

If they move regions to an "on demand" kind of system i wonder how this is going to affect scripts, since a lot of them are supposed to run all the time.

I mean... what about my prime numbers?

Edited May 22, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Klytyna]

25 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I am, however, the "be all and end all" of information for the bit of mainland where I've been for many years,

Translation for English speakers:

" I've spent 11 years standing in the ruins of my abandoned store, with my thumb up my ass... If  they didn't come to my store, they do not exist..."

Remember you are speaking to one who thought SL had " a couple of dozen vampires on 2 or 3 sims" and that "shopping isn't a big thing in SL" and that only paid up members of the Entitlement Club were allowed to buy L$...

"When you understand the nature of a thing, you know what it is capable off" 
 

[Phil Deakins]

One of the Lindens recently posted that they aren't looking at an 'on demand' system yet.