Day: October 22, 2020

Things are moving apace with the project to transition all of the Second Life services and simulators to running on Amazon AWS cloud services.

• On Friday, October 16th, Oz Linden offered a blog update (which I also blogged about) – when there were 100 regions on the main grid running via AWS.
• On  Tuesday October 20th, I then blogged about the move to expand the number of regions running on AWS.
• On the same day, I was able to give an update with news that the number of regions on AWS had increased to around 300.

On Wednesday, October 21st, April Linden gave a further update on the project’s status – A Light in the Cloud: A Migration Update– noting that around 1,000 regions are now based on AWS. However, her blog post also comes with a request:

The favour I’ve come to ask you for is your patience.

We’re doing our very best to fix things that come up as we go. This means that we might need to restart regions more often than you’re used to, and things may break just a little more often than we’ve all been accustomed to.

In order to get this project done as fast as possible and minimize the time (and resulting bugs) we have to spend with one foot in our datacenter and the other in the cloud, we don’t want to limit ourselves to restarting regions just once a week. We’re ready to get this project done! We’ve seen how much better Second Life runs in the cloud, and we’re ready to have everyone on the grid experience it.

I’m sorry that things might be a little rough over the next few weeks. It’s our goal to finish the cloud migration by the holidays, so that everyone, Resident and Linden alike, can have a nice quiet holiday with our friends and families.

We can’t promise we’ll make it by then, but we’re sure giving it all we’ve got. The mood around the Lab is really positive right now, and we’re all working hard together to make it happen. I’m really proud to be a part of the team that’s transforming Second Life as we know it.

April Linden

There’s obviously a good way to go before everything is settled, 1,000 regions is a small number compared to the the total on the grid, and there are still various back-end systems to be migrated.

But when you consider the sheer volume of work involved in migrating all of the Lab’s systems and properties related to Second Life, the entire project has, from a user perspective, been remarkably smooth thus far – and hopefully things will continue to be so.

Read all of April’s post here.