The announcement of Elastic Block Store has opened the flood gates for new methods of using, distributing, and monetizing opensource software. The very nature of opensource software is that it is emergent – always getting enhanced by the community. Opensim – the opensource server side SecondLife like virtual world is no exception.
Opensim + Amazon EC2 is a made for each other pair – heavy computing and bandwidth offered by AWS is a boon for computing and bandwidth intensive OpenSim. So far, the transient nature of EC2 made it unattractive to host OpenSim in EC2 without custom engineering. Elastic Block Store changes that. Now it is possible to make the data persistent.
Venkat and I are experimenting with hosting OpenSim on EC2 + EBS. We will share the results as we progress. Along with sharing the technical nuances involved, we are planning to make it available via DevPay. Who said there is no money to be made in OpenSource?
I am very interested in hearing more about your work to get OpenSim running on EC2. Please feel free to keep me in the loop as your work progresses.