03.22.07
Second Life + Amazon EC2
Much has been written lately about Linden Labs having problems scaling the backend server fleet behind Second Life. At the same time, there has long been call for Linden Labs to open up Second Life to outside server operators. Just as the web would not enjoy the scale and popularity that it does if it were a closed monolithic system, so Second Life cannot really attain its potential if it stays a a Linden Labs walled garden.
I’ve read various interviews with Linden Labs execs talking about their tentative plans to open up third party server access to Second Life. From what I’ve read they are exploring a variety of possibilities from completely open sourcing the server code, to licensing the software commercial for companies to run their own colo servers, to colocating other companies’ servers inside Linden Labs data centers. One option I’ve not heard is how appropriate Amazon’s EC2 elastic compute cloud would be to running third party second life servers (or even for Linden Labs’ own use). EC2 is “elastic” by design, so the compute nodes can be scaled up and scaled down as traffic demands.
Although the current Second Life model is that one region is represented by one compute node, and these regions are persistant whether any residents are currently in the region or not, I’m not sure that model fits all use cases.
A lot of what goes on in Second Life is “event-based”. That is, an event of some kind (music performance, book signing, publicity apperance, whatever) will happen in a given location at a specific time. Today these occur in regions that are persistant 24 hours a day, and perhaps not widely trafficed most of the day. Instead a better model might be to have event venues spun up “on-demand” using EC2, and shut down after the event is over.
Of course the holy grail for Linden Labs would be to decouple the notion of a region from a compute node. If multiple compute nodes could cooperate in parallel to run a region, the full benefit of an on-demand compute grid such as EC2 could be realized. Popularity spikes in a given region could be addressed by spinning up additional EC2 resources, and those nodes could be turned off as residents wander off.
Whether or not Linden Labs decides to go with this model, it’s something that other up-and-coming virtual world systems, such as the Virtual Object System or SUN’s Project Darkstar should take a look at.
Martin said,
March 23, 2007 at 2:47 pm
http://www.Qwaq.com is another interesting “Second Life behind the firewall” company…
mridley said,
March 24, 2007 at 12:27 am
@Martin- thanks for the pointer. Was not familiar with that company. Will check it out.
-m