Bots in "The Cloud"?

Are there currently any Second Life clients running in "the cloud", such as Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, etc. ?

I don't understand the question, but if it's anything to do with bots suddenly appearing as clouds, the new viewer (1.23) causes openmv bots to appear as clouds.

Last night, when I learned of it, I had to remove my store models until I get it sorted out. Today I logged them on viewers.

"The Cloud" is a term for virtualized computing capability available over the internet. In other words, you write the programs, then run them somewhere else - you don't care or need to know exactly what machine they run on, the service provider handles details like that. Both the computing and data storage may be run on multiple machines at once, with the number of machines dependent on the workload the program imposes, i.e., they are distributed and scalable.

Google Apps Engine is free, and it's easy enough to use that I even managed to write and run a program using it.

When running bots from one's home computer one is limited by the number of bots your one computer can run. It's possible that a single bot runner could run thousands and thousands of bots on "the cloud", if the idea works at all.

Interesting. I've never heard of those facilities before.

Google App Engine is at appengine.google.com. Started out with Python support, and has now added Java.

I'm also wondering if one can register for Second Life accounts using automated registration programs running "in the cloud" , and if there's any reason why a person might want to do that, such a evading attempts limit account creation by one person.

There was a post in Jack's "Camping" thread where the landowner had removed her bots (I think it was a "her" because of the new rule, but still got a warning about bots that were there, but that she hadn't put there - and a competitor was involved.

The idea of putting bots on a competitor's land came up and, if the "cloud" you speak of can be used for bots, I am sure that there are people who are unscrupulous enough to use it to screw their competitors because LL can't attribute the bots to any user.

The Google App Engine is a "platform" vs. something like Amazon's EC2 which is more akin to raw server space that can be provisioned any way you'd like. The Google App Engine has very specific constraints as to what can be deployed (for my account for instance, I can do Java apps only but there is a Python runtime environment too) and has constraints as to what an application can do with regards to things such as I/O, threading and most importantly, apps cannot use sockets. I don't know much about SL or the protocols involved, but being limited to only ports 80 and 443 via HTTP/S, I'd rule the Google App Engine out.

On that note though, I'd think that Linden Labs would be tripping over themselves to get out of the server hosting business and put sims in the cloud in something like Amazon's model. This nonsense about buying hardware and provisioning it should be put to rest. The concept that if no one is on a sim then there is no need to run it and only provision the server on the fly when needed (i.e. when some one is there) is quite appealing.

Thanks,

Archer

www.sinewaverobots.com

Their bots run on Amazon Cloud. You can use 1 for free or pay to have multiples I believe. They can be scripted to do limited things. And no, the source code isn't available.

Sounds like they run on EC2, although I don't see any evidence of that on their home page. Anyway that is not quite the same as what Suzanne was talking about. A few of my bots run on Amazon EC2 instances. It's more expensive than regular hosting but so amazingly convenient.

It would take a fairly staggering amount of work to port the openmv library to python or java and I doubt anyone has done it. Also, if it's true that you can't use sockets on AppEngine then I'm pretty sure (but not certain) it would be impossible to connect to SL.

Not exactly on the cloud but bot hosting is available inworld, the bot doesn't run on your computer.

I see, i just went by the title. But i assume ultimately she wanted a client for the purpose of havng a bot. Thus the title. I think it was in their original promotional material about it being on Amazon, but yes I don't see mention now. There's more info on their FAQ:
http://www.sinewaverobots.com/home/support.php

Thanks for the link Darien.

I don't actually want a bunch of bots in the cloud for my own use, it's just a thought I had. First came the thought of libomv (libsl for us old folks) clients running in large number.

Then the idea of those bots griefing, having their accounts cancelled, and programs in the cloud creating new email accounts and then new SL accounts, avoiding being blocked by ip address by virtual of running anywhere in the world. This part of it was more of a nightmare than something I want.

That signwave page is interesting. You can get a bot to do a bunch of stuff, and don't have to know anything about libomv, and for those that want to pay you can have them run on their servers for 5 linden bucks an hour.

Also interesting in that you can use their system with 3 bots on your own machine for free. Exactly what good that does you I'm not sure but for free it might be worth checking out.

If I understand correctly Sinewave is runing libomv clients on their servers, actually running the c# code on their servers. I wonder how many they can run total.

Microsoft Azure is a form of "cloud computing", and I think you can run c# code using Azure, so it might offer some promise for running bots in the cloud. I suspect that it will still fail due to lack of port access.