Ebbe Altberg confirmed last week on 15th August via Twitter that Linden Lab are still on track for Second Life to complete the move into the cloud (Amazon Web Services) this year. Ebbe mentioned that there are “lots of things already run in the cloud” and that simulators are testing well as you can see”.
The AWS transition over on the beta grid seems to be working ok with a tiny handful of regions now in the cloud like the Blake Sea and some of the welcome area regions. There have been some problems with region crossings recently. See here for details.
“As part of moving regions to the cloud we discovered that region crossings between the cloud and our data center were terrible”.
“Once this new code was written, the performance when going from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week”.
“It’s really exciting that the cloud migration is helping us find really old bugs and make Second Life better as we go.”
It’s good to hear from Ebbe that “great progress” is being made and hopefully the move will be finished before the end of 2020.
Ebbe said that “placing regions outside of our starting zone is something I hope we can work on next year”. So basically “move it all first. Then find ways to optimize”.
Hopefully the lab will keep the Second Life community updated on the latest developments in the months ahead via the Second Life blog. The Second Life Server page on the Second Life forums is very useful way to keep updated on the latest deploy roll-outs, problems and much more.
Daniel Voyager 