so we beat to death the topic of OpenSim on a stick but how about OpenSim on a cloud?
cloud computing is all the rage and with good reason. it makes sense, saves money, can be easier for employees and customers to use, and is nice for the environment
i have been involved in a twitter conversation with Virtual Quandary about cloud computing and virtual worlds. i have no idea who VQ is but that is okay, i am not real anyway =)
for Enclave Harbour, our dedicated server costs something like $408 a year in electricity to operate and it sits empty for 16-24 hours a day. that’s a lot of resource being wasted. i would gladly wait a minute or more for my region to come online if i knew it was being loaded in the cloud. i wait for my pc to start, so what’s the big deal?
of course, for a corporate offering, making a customer wait is a big “no, no” and we need to change that. imagine how many servers are sitting idle for Linden Lab right now? *good thing i am wearing flip flops to help me count*
but as consumers, we want more and we want it NOW! look at google’s instant search thing, good Lord, as if 1 million results returned in 0.o42 seconds about black olives was not fast enough, now we have “instant” results (which distract me like mad, but i am high strung, OCD, OPP, and whatever else) =p
google already has like 2 to 3 million servers cranking away. one study said two searches is the equivalent to boiling a teapot for one cup of tea! dang, that’s a lot of tea! even if that is not the case, it takes serious juice to run that many servers!
if Linden Lab did cloud computing, the potential savings would be huge but you would need a supportive customer base as well. it could be marketed as being “green”, et cetera
competition brings about these changes and i’ll point to the hospitality industry as an example where being green means more profits. being “green” is great business for top tier hotels, casinos, and convention centres because they actually charge more for “green” function packages (bulk nuts and chips instead of individual bags, pitchered water and real glasses instead of bottled water, not washing sheets everyday, and so on). customers will and do pay more and the hotel saves money plus the environment actually benefits a little. now there is also a push to secure more local stuff, which furthers the green thing and also increase hotel revenues plus gives them more to market about
OpenSim is changing all of this for virtual worlds and is providing competition to Linden Lab, including being green in the cloud
there is a group doing cloud OpenSim called Sim-OnDemand
i don’t know much about them, but i believe for situations where you may need a hundred sims for a function, their’s is the cheapest and fastest way to go. remember when CSI: NY did the Second Life thing? i believe they had 87 identical Manhattan sims to carry the load (boy, that was a sweet gig for Electric Artists eh?). that could have been handled with cloud computing (if LL would have allowed OAR uploading of the base sim)
Linden Lab will need to continue to innovate or they will be displaced (this assumes they want to grow, which with policies of late, seems almost a dubious thought) o_O
regardless, being green with servers is also something that we may be seeing more of, even for virtual worlds =)
of course the clouds are branded! & good thing i made a helicopter . . .
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ener Hax, DrenBoy. DrenBoy said: RT @iliveisl: w00t! new post – virtual clouds for OpenSim http://bit.ly/bLGKSK – and a big hello @virtualquandary =) [...]
Tweets that mention virtual clouds for OpenSim at i live in science land -- Topsy.com
31 Oct 10 at 2:41 pm
SpotOn3D also offers cloud-based OpenSims by the hour.
And if you’re technically savvy, you can install OpenSim on the Amazon C3 cloud and run it yourself — the Diva Distro is particularly nice here, especially with its nice new WiFi server console! Expect to pay around $0.10 per hour, or about $70 a month for a Diva Distro (four regions) though I haven’t tested it to see what the maximum concurrent user capacity and prim capacity is.
– Maria
Maria Korolov
31 Oct 10 at 3:19 pm
ooh, i will check that out. i am curious what you get for hardware with that. interesting about running it yourself too. seeing as i was able to get Diva working on the stick (albeit, that is probably many orders easier than configuring a real server) it reall should not require that high a tech skill to get it going =)
Ener Hax
31 Oct 10 at 5:05 pm
“making a customer wait is a big “no, no”
I once introduced a friend to SecondLife. I created their account, logged in, went past Help Island, TP’d to the a shopping sim, logged out, and instructed them to login to last location where I met her.
Now, being male, I am as bad at Real Life clothes shopping but better in Second Life. Long story short, even this wasnt fast enough, and it became frustrating for her as I walked thru how to buy from a vendor, put on clothes and fit them.
Her final comment was frustrating – “But I need things to happen now”.
Breen Whitman
31 Oct 10 at 5:05 pm
wow Breen! that sums it up for most of us! gee, the old days of needing to complete orientation island before going anywhere! it took me two days because i thought you were supposed to avoid the rats with the seqway, not run over them! =D
that was very nice of you to do that for her. you wanted to share what you found as a neat tool but she just was not ready for that it seems
Ener Hax
31 Oct 10 at 5:14 pm
As a quick and dirty summary, the Amazon EC2 Cloud service is quite nice.
Remember though, that with cloud computing your sim will not survive a system shutdown, IE when the cloud service is triggered to flush your service.
You also need a place to *store your sim state*. For Amazon this would mean you also need somewhere to store your files. For Amazon this is the Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service.
Which leaves the Inventory Database which is MySQL. I would recomend it is hosted on a paid for VM always up such as Dreamhost.
Opensim hosting is a worst case scenario. Just as Linden Labs face a similar problem, they must have over capacity.
The maker of the MineCraft game found this recently. Someone picked up a story about this great little game and within 24 hours his servers were a smoking pile of ash. He recovered from that and is just now, starting to investigate cloud services. As an aside in this case, his revenue jumped from a few hundred Euros per day to currently in the order of $100,000 per day.
One never knows when an “Ansche Chung” story will occur.
Breen Whitman
31 Oct 10 at 6:09 pm
dang Breen! you know your stuff! holy cow (ie, anyone need an consultant with deep knowledge? contact Breen!)
nice on the SQL db storage, i know our SQL db backups are about 4 GB. i like HostGator and it is unlimited diskspace for about $12 USD per month
i particularly like your reference to Anshe and that is very true isn’t it =)
Ener Hax
31 Oct 10 at 6:27 pm
Yes, as Maria mentioned, SpotON3D® offers a cloudservice-per-hour on demand. Very cool if you are going to have a big party, a concert, conduct a class or demonstration, etc. Gets you 100 avatars (they think it may go higher, but haven’t been able to test it yet!) per region with no lag.
By the way, with your verified account you can have up to five avatars, all independent with their own inventories and autonomy. The Key Account Holder (you) is in control of the passwords and the money for those accounts, but otherwise they are separate. Good way to invite friends or family in to toodle around and have a look. Also good for employer/employee connections and parent/child access control.
Maybe when my regions are all built and prettified I’ll give the cloud service a try. ;-)
Caliburn Susanto
31 Oct 10 at 11:41 pm
thanks Caliburn! wow, 100 avatars! not too shabby!
https://spoton3d.com/
ahhhh =( they stretched a rounded rectangle to make their Join Now button! =( that hurts my heart . . .
but don’t let that stop you =)
Ener Hax
31 Oct 10 at 11:54 pm
Erm, yeah. Good point (wants to have a talk with them about their website — methinks somebody got too busy to keep and eye on it). Neatness counts. :-)
Caliburn Susanto
1 Nov 10 at 12:47 am
I would really love to see how opensim runs on the platform.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
When I look at that link it doesn’t strike me that using EC2 would somehow magically make everything work better/faster. They’re giving you 4 virtual cores to work with at the high end which really isn’t a ton. The work Intel has done shows us that if anything to get a very high amount of avatars on a sim would require you to have a few of these instances running a distributed scene graph.
I guess my point is that I keep seeing all these posts that “the cloud” will solve all your compute problems. It really wont in a lot of cases unless you’re willing to get a few high end instances to obtain your desired compute power. Just because you purchase a cloud server doesn’t mean you’re getting unlimited access to every server EC2 hosts. They limit you to the virtual equivalent of physical servers that vary in power depending on what you pay.
I can see the utility in this for renting a few hours of simulator time.. but again it’s not just going to magically be faster because it’s in the cloud.
Other issues that may affect a realtime service like opensim: http://alan.blog-city.com/amazon_ec2_latency_the_pretty_graphs.htm
However, I think that amazon S3 and related services are a great way to offload storage. But that’s a different story entirely.
Tranquillity
1 Nov 10 at 2:07 am
i agree and also think that this is only useful for events like conferences. say i am a hotel hosting some large conference, i could offer an upsell of a virtual component to it. i would then hire, say Ener Hax for a zillion dollars, who would make my setup, import the sponsors exhibits, set up URLs and downloads, etc. Ener would then use those OARs a day or so ahead of the event to set up 20 sims in the cloud (like i would have a clue!)
this way the hotel only gets the sims for a short time without the setup fee as in SL (so no $20,000 outlay for a weeks’s worth of sims
now SL used to rent sims for events at a reasonable rate, but i don’t know i they still do
would this be something InWorldz could maybe offer? seems like there “could” be a need for this, however i think that type of sustained demand is a ways off
Ener Hax
1 Nov 10 at 10:35 am
Agreed there’s room for innovation in cloud-based virtual world offerings. It has it’s applications and large scale events are smack in the middle, but hey I can see personal use as an option as well, for general day-2-day.
Like you, I don’t mind waiting to have a space spin up, I already wait to login and get transported to a sim, then wait to have objects rez in. For general use, a world based solely around spinning up spaces, would have great implications, as much as SL is influenced by prim limits. It would be interesting to see how this changes the dynamics we’ve come to know. I think, me having this type of expectations of SL might be a light years away, I don’t see where Linden Research would go about re-architecting what they already have, results might go the way of Netscape. I fear with SL there’s only a tiny amount of performance to be gained after finding ways to optimize. If it’s true that Linden Research are testing cloud based rendering perhaps it will allow them to gain much more. I do wonder if the new browser based viewer, `SkyLight,` is to serve not only as a window into the world but a way to contain users in an environment where they no longer experience the horrendous performance that is the `in world experience.`
I know it’s popular to think of Amazon when thinking of the cloud. But it’s possible to have a private cloud as well, there’d be upfront costs for hardware surely but it’s a viable option for minimizing costs(if you know you’ll have a large install base) and limitations you’d find yourself running into depending solely on EC2 while also allowing you to customize to the performance thresholds required for your product offering. Amazon can later serve as a mixin when your close to exceeding your local capacity. Based on Tyche Shepherd’s survey, half of all grid regions are empty at anytime. A new entrant into the virtual world arena should take that up for consideration and align their architecture to function within such a use case, where all simulators aren’t required to have a dedicated location but can be spun up, selected dynamically when needed either locally or remotely. Of course going back to SL, there’s a contiguous space requirement, so on some level the requirement here would need to be relaxed.
I can’t say I’m entirely satisfied with where virtual world architecture, governance, and business models are at the moment. I believe choice is good but there’s a certain mix that’s missing and no one has it yet if vw are to go mainstream. We’ll know it when we see it. Still, it’s wonderful to see the various patterns devised and how things progress. Majority of users are most likely content with what’s available now or around the bend, options have multiplied, offerings are good enough, and we’re steadily approaching a point where worlds need support (an area of interest).
VirtualQuandary (VQ)
10 Nov 10 at 7:01 pm
well put! the direction of virtual worlds certainly seems to be stumbling along, but it will find a way at some point. it is very niche still and browser-access would help
but look at even incredibly well embedded technologies like Flash. it is ubiquitous and used for much more than just video, yet Steve Jobs decides not to support it on the iPad and the world goes nuts (well, it affects the eLearning world greatly)
Ener Hax
10 Nov 10 at 7:37 pm