Case Study: Linden Lab achieves 60% faster build and deployment times with Amazon Web Services (Amazon EC2 Container Service)

Linden Lab - Customer Case Study

Linden Lab, the San Francisco–based company behind the Second Life virtual world and projects like Blocksworld and Project Sansar, needed to move from slow, monolithic applications on immutable bare‑metal images (with deployments taking up to 15 minutes) to a faster, more consistent container-based platform that could run at scale. Early attempts with open-source orchestration tools proved unstable and hard to manage, so the team sought a reliable, scalable container management solution.

Linden Lab adopted Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) to run Project Sansar’s containerized web and backend services across EC2 clusters, added a custom scheduler for PCI and resource constraints, and integrated CI/CD with Jenkins and Drone.io, plus Elastic Load Balancing and CloudFormation for provisioning. The result was dramatically faster, more stable operations—builds now take 1–2 minutes and deployments 1–3 minutes (roughly a 60% speedup), with reduced management overhead and improved scalability.

Linden Lab

Landon McDowell

Vice President of Operations