Recharging the batteries, bribing city states.
What a crazy week it’s been! First we got a lot more players, then the servers crashed as a result of that, leading to a rather spur-of-the-moment free weekend and several days of learning new stuff like what Cloud computing actually is and how it can be used.
Minecraft.net is now running on a central traditionally hosted computer, but the database and almost all large file downloads have been moved out to the cloud (Amazon RDB and Amazon S3, respectively). It seems to be fairly expensive compared to the regular way of doing it, but the scalability and ease of use (you get a new server within a minute of ordering it!) really weighs up for it. What’s even cooler is that it seems really easy to add a content delivery network (makes the downloads automatically come from mirror closest to the person requesting the file).
But enough tech-love about hosting..
I’m exhausted! I’d really like to do a Seecret Friday update, both to keep you guys happy and to actually get to do some programming myself, but I need to wind down.
And.. Civilization 5 just got unlocked on Steam.
I’ll see you on the other side!