Is the Cloud Working?

[Gage Wirefly]

1 minute ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I was under the impression that the Uplift project started long before the sale, though a sale was likely in the minds of upper management when the project started.  

They truly were out of room at their data center.  That is why they had to stop creating new regions until the cloud move completed.  New regions would require more servers, but they had no place to put new servers.

I really don't buy this explanation. The land business is stagnate and has been for some time. 

[LittleMe Jewell]

7 minutes ago, Gage Wirefly said:

I really don't buy this explanation. The land business is stagnate and has been for some time. 

While Mainland is definitely pretty stagnate, there really was a surge in the demand for new private regions this past year.  We had tons of threads here in the forums from people complaining that they couldn't buy new regions.  A different set of folks were complaining because LL had to halt the rollout of the Linden Homes because they didn't have the ability to create the regions.

[Gage Wirefly]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

While Mainland is definitely pretty stagnate, there really was a surge in the demand for new private regions this past year.  We had tons of threads here in the forums from people complaining that they couldn't buy new regions.  A different set of folks were complaining because LL had to halt the rollout of the Linden Homes because they didn't have the ability to create the regions.

I only saw a few threads but not tons, semantics I know.  I think a lot of this is normalcy bias, that the end of something can't happen. I believe it's happening. 

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

While Mainland is definitely pretty stagnate, there really was a surge in the demand for new private regions this past year.  We had tons of threads here in the forums from people complaining that they couldn't buy new regions.  A different set of folks were complaining because LL had to halt the rollout of the Linden Homes because they didn't have the ability to create the regions.

Any full region for sale seemed to go quickly if you watched that forum at all.  When they did open the land store, what they had available.went quickly.  I think land sales always fluctuate.  Always have.  Where one person has to release their holdings, there is always someone there to pick it up.  

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/27/2021 at 1:33 PM, Solar Legion said:

With incredibly few exceptions, no one is paying $30 for ads. The amount the OP is lamenting is L$30 paid per parcel for that parcel to show in Search.

That last bit is important and - splitting hairs here - is not an Ad. Classifieds are Ads. Showing a Parcel in Search is a L$ sink.

Any listing you PAY FOR is an AD. Hello! And the Lindens call it that, as I have explained.

It has a lot of usage in fact, as the search/places used to show.

Just because it's a sink doesn't mean it's not an ad. I pay for it. It's an ad.

 

[Solar Legion]

1. No, the Lindens do not call it an Ad - the checkbox says nothing of the sort and that is all that matters.
2. No, paying for it does not automatically make it an Ad.

You want an Ad? Go pay for a Classified listing. That is reality - deal with it.

[Prokofy Neva]

5 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

I thought of more like when you move to a new house.  You've packed all your stuff and all the boxes are in the correct rooms but it still takes time to get things in order.  Your stuff isn't going to fit exactly as it did in your previous home so it's trial and error finding the right spot.  It might somewhat the same with LL.  All their stuff is in the cloud and now it's just a matter of finding where it works best and tweaking it so it fits.

Code isn't a thing, though, it's digital.

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Solar Legion said:

1. No, the Lindens do not call it an Ad - the checkbox says nothing of the sort and that is all that matters.
2. No, paying for it does not automatically make it an Ad.

You want an Ad? Go pay for a Classified listing. That is reality - deal with it.

Any listing you PAY FOR is an AD. Hello! And the Lindens call it that, as I have explained. Ask one.

It has a lot of usage in fact, as the search/places used to show.

Just because it's a sink doesn't mean it's not an ad. I pay for it. It's an ad.

If it's not an ad, the Lindens can stop charging for it. Just because there are also classified ads you can pay varying amounts more doesn't mean that the fixed ad of $30 for search/places isn't an ad. 

It's a silly thing to keep ranting isn't an ad, because regardless of what you wish to call it, it's a paid ad, something you must pay for. Search normally doesn't pick up your parcel if it is NOT checked off and paid. And when there is this much garbage returning on a search, it becomes a useless expense which is difficult even to discontinue because you can't find the places where it is checked unless you go on Firestorm.

 

[Solar Legion]

Keep tilting at that windmill and denying reality - meaning what is right in front of you.

A Linden statement is worthless without the actual verbiage in the Viewer itself reflecting it - that is all there is to it.

Now then, don't you have some rant post to go type out on your blog?

[Lucia Nightfire]

On 1/27/2021 at 6:25 AM, ChinRey said:

According to OZ, the LL developers used the cloud migration as an excuse to do some serious code cleaning. That should improve the performance even thous the migration itself didn't.

When did he say this? He and other developers have stated in the user groups that the focus was to just get the code into the cloud and not waste time on cleanup.

They did state during this process they took notes or areas of code that needed cleanup/overhaul once the move was done.

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Code isn't a thing, though, it's digital.

Amd you're a.......Person who apparently can't grasp the essence of what I was saying. 

[ChinRey]

38 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

They did state during this process they took notes or areas of code that needed cleanup/overhaul once the move was done.

Oh, maybe that was it then. It's all on the "things to do, urgent" list. 😛

[Solar Legion]

3 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

Amd you're a.......Person who apparently can't grasp the essence of what I was saying. 

Par for the course for them I am afraid. The concept that this sort of move (from one server system to another) can cause havoc or require more work than simply copy, paste, go live is .... alien to them and those like them.

[ChinRey]

44 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Par for the course for them I am afraid. The concept that this sort of move (from one server system to another) can cause havoc or require more work than simply copy, paste, go live is .... alien to them and those like them.

Yes but to be fair, the Lab did hype the migration up quite a lot so it's only natural for users to expect some noticeable benefit from it.

To sum it up: Linden Lab has switched from one server provider to another for Second Life. For the most part there is no particular reason to expect the new provider to offer better or worse quality than the old one. There will be teething problems at first of course but hopefully that will pass. The only obvious potential downside is that the new provider has their servers spread out across the world rather than located in one spot. This is bound to cause delays when data is transferred between servers, such as when you cross a sim border, but so far it seems LL has found solutions to this problem. Apart from that, "Cloud" is nothing more than a meaningless buzzword in this context.

(Edit: That being said, I am a little bit worried about Graviton. For those few not familiar with it, Graviton is Amazon's own brand name for the ARM processor and as I mentined earlier, they are busy replacing their traditional Intel powered servers with Graviton based ones. The ARM processor is used in nearly all smartphones since it uses much less power than Intel and AMD processors but after more than 30 years, it still hasn't made much impact on the higher performance computer market.)

Assuming that they didn't fall into the buzzword trap, LL's reasons for migrating to AWS must have been more flexibility when it comes to scaling and lower prices. Probably a lot lower prices. For comparasion, a full region in SL costs about 190 US dollars a month. Another commercial (opensim based) grid I'm on that has used AWS for years already, offers a slightly smaller package for 15 dollars a month and a considerably larger one for 20.

Whether LL is going to pass some of that saving on to the users, remains to be seen. They probably don't have to since they don't really have any direct competition. The quality of the software and the support isn't any better than that other grid I mentioned (and one or two others as well) but Second Life has its captive audience, it has mainland (which allbeit sadly neglected is pretty much unique) and thanks to an army of unpaid/underpaid content creators it has a huge selection of cotnent for people to play around with.

Edited January 30, 2021 by ChinRey

[AnthonyJoanne]

Let's leave the potential ramifications of not owning your own infrastructure aside and consider the migration from the perspective of the users. Also - I'm not calling it an uplift because I've seen a number of projects (elsewhere, I'm not talking SL) where migration to the cloud was demonstrably a significant downgrade.

LL has moved SL to the cloud. Who cares?

That might seem an odd thing to say, but bear with me for a moment.

From the user perspective SL running on the cloud or on LL hardware is pretty much irrelevant if we don't see any benefit (or penalty) from the move.

How you define benefit is somewhat variable from person to person but I think we would all agree that the following would be (almost universally) seen as benefits:

• Reduced costs of operation which LL then passes on to the users of SL (e.g. cheaper land, lower cost for premium, cheaper $L, etc)
• Performance improvements e.g. Less lag, faster/smoother region crossings, faster avatar loading, faster texture loading, more reliable teleports, etc
• Better MP (faster operation, better search, etc)
• Elimination of bugs

I'm sure there are plenty of others, but the above list gives you an idea what people would generally view as 'benefits' and I'm not going to bother thinking up a huge list. Obviously penalties would be things like increases costs to the users, performance loss, etc.

Parenthetically ... I'm well aware that performance is also heavily influenced by the client, and the hardware upon which the client is running (which the cloud migration has no impact on). Don't waste my time and yours pointing that out because it is not relevant. Equally I'm well aware that infrastructure migration can't have any impact on most bugs directly. Again it's not relevant. The reason these things are irrelevant is the actual point of this entire post: For the user, the migration to the cloud means exactly nothing until it makes our SL better in some way.

Permit me to illustrate with an analogy: You buy your bread from a local bakery. It is grade A bread which costs you 1 money unit per loaf. The owner of the bakery changes to a different flour which is cheaper. The taste of the bread remains the same, the quality of the bread remains the same, the price per loaf remains 1 money unit and the savings go into the pocket of the owner as increased profit. The change of flour therefore has zero impact on you as a customer.

Someone is bound to point out that the migration to the cloud makes operations more scalable. The idea being that LL can spin up new servers quickly. But that's a benefit for LL ... and until that flows on as a benefit to the users of SL, it remains irrelevant. Another argument might be that the new infrastructure will make it easier for LL to improve things in the future. Again, that's irrelevant until things improve.

Now it's demonstrable that the migration has had a negative impact on the users ... LL were assigning resources to the migration process rather than assigning them to other projects which would improve our SL, but that is an inevitable consequence of such a project and is unavoidable, so I'm not going to kick them over that.

So it boils down to this: If the benefits of migrating to the cloud are only benefits to LL, and they don't flow on to us as users in some tangible way ... then the cloud migration is irrelevant to us.

[Solar Legion]

@ChinRey: Hyped or not, no one should have expected even half of what some seem to think was going to happen, let alone what those such as the OP seem to have expected. Not helping matters are those who seem insistent on blaming the Uplift for a plethora of problems that - in all reality - already existed in one form or another.

Linden Lab did not simply swap their servers out for 'better' ones - they changed systems and protocols. The physical hardware may be 'better' but the tradeoff there is that the system is not the same as it was when Linden Lab had their own hardware.

[ChinRey]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

@ChinRey: Hyped or not, no one should have expected even half of what some seem to think was going to happen, let alone what those such as the OP seem to have expected.

Oh yes, I won't disagree with you there but people are people.

 

2 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Linden Lab did not simply swap their servers out for 'better' ones - they changed systems and protocols. The physical hardware may be 'better' but the tradeoff there is that the system is not the same as it was when Linden Lab had their own hardware.

Did they run their own servers? I thought they had farmed that out long ago.

But if they did, there's a third reason for the change: Migration to cure migraine. Maintaining a relatively small server park can be quite a headache.

[Harper Held]

15 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

LL has moved SL to the cloud. Who cares?

 

'nuff said

for real.

[Arielle Popstar]

Though they are now in the cloud, the cloud machines are in one location (Phoenix AZ?) as per Oz. In the coming months they will be looking at distributing those more globally focusing on busy areas. That will reduce the latency hopefully for many and reduce lag to some degree for a better experience. Uploading all the data to the cloud is just the first part of the project. More to come.

[Solar Legion]

5 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Though they are now in the cloud, the cloud machines are in one location (Phoenix AZ?) as per Oz. In the coming months they will be looking at distributing those more globally focusing on busy areas. That will reduce the latency hopefully for many and reduce lag to some degree for a better experience. Uploading all the data to the cloud is just the first part of the project. More to come.

The above is also something that quite seems to have either slipped people's minds or simply been utterly ignored.

[ChinRey]

I'm repeating myself a little bit here. Sorry.

14 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

• Reduced costs of operation which LL then passes on to the users of SL (e.g. cheaper land, lower cost for premium, cheaper $L, etc)

Time will show. But the prices LL charges are not really related to their actual running costs, it's more about what they think they can get away with and changing host shouldn't change that very much.

 

17 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

• Performance improvements e.g. Less lag, faster/smoother region crossings, faster avatar loading, faster texture loading, more reliable teleports, etc

That's not going to happen, at least not as a direct result of the migration.

 

18 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

• Better MP (faster operation, better search, etc)

MP is run on completely different, pefectly normal web server(s). There's no reason to believe it will be affected at all.

 

19 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

• Elimination of bugs

AWS isn't doing bug fixes for you so no changes here either.

 

22 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

So it boils down to this: If the benefits of migrating to the cloud are only benefits to LL, and they don't flow on to us as users in some tangible way ... then the cloud migration is irrelevant to us.

It is relevant because people have been taken in by the hype and expect big improvements. I think Prokofy is speaking for many SL users in this and we need to adress the situation properly to try to counter these unrealistic expectations LL has created.

I don't think they did it on purpose btw. The cloud migration is great news for Linden Lab in general and for the developers and upper managment in particular. They're genuinely excited about it and it doesn't occur to them that not everybody else have reasons to share their excitement. It's aother example of how SL is created by developers for developers.

[Arielle Popstar]

Just now, Solar Legion said:

The above is also something that quite seems to have either slipped people's minds or simply been utterly ignored.

Don't think it has really been mentioned. My thought when stuff is uplifted to the cloud is a hazy thought the data is auto distributed to servers around the globe in some magical way but because I noticed my ping was still around 120 ms I asked Oz about it and he then explained about the cloud servers still being fairly local in southwest USA. He then went on to explain what they planned for distributing the servers more globally when things started to settle.

[ChinRey]

9 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Though they are now in the cloud, the cloud machines are in one location (Phoenix AZ?) as per Oz.

Ah! That might explains why we haven't seen any increase in sim crossing issues ... yet. Now I'm getting a bit worried.

 

11 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

In the coming months they will be looking at distributing those more globally focusing on busy areas. That will reduce the latency hopefully for many and reduce lag to some degree for a better experience.

That is a two edged sword if ever there was one. The key factor here is the distance in the physical world between server and client. Move a simulator from a server in USA to one in Germany and German users will get the same performance as American ones used to have. But American users will get the lower performance German ones used to have. A simulator has to be run by one server - virtual or not - located in one specific place in the physical world. It can't be split up across different locations. With clients all over the world, moving servers around becomes a zero sum game, what one user gains, another looses.

[AnthonyJoanne]

11 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I'm repeating myself a little bit here. Sorry.

I think you missed my point. I'm well aware of what the migration can and can't achieve in and of itself.

BUT ... all of that is completely irrelevant if it has no positive (or negative) impact on the users.

Whether it's going to prove to be a good thing for LL remains to be seen. I've seen far too many people who should know better fail to understand the realities of the cloud. I had a former colleague who was convinced that you could treat the cloud as if it were local to all geographic locations.

[ChinRey]

1 minute ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

I think you missed my point.

No, I didn't miss your point, I just tried to elaborate them a bit because, as you say, so many people misunderstand what the cloud is.

Oh well, let's just be grateful LL hasn't announced they're moving SL to blockchain. (Please, don't tell any Linden marketers about this post, we don't want to give them ideas!)