Zynga Changes The Game On Cloud Computing

Zynga detailed the evolution of their zCloud servers that host all of their games yesterday. It's a fascinating look at the innovation behind the social games that everybody knows and loves.

The company hosted its games on third-party servers in the beginning of their business. They didn't expect any of their games to take off as fast as Farmville did. They say that within the first six weeks on Facebook, Farmville grew from zero to 10 million daily active users. The game hit an astonishing 25 million DUAs within the first five months.

They moved Farmville to Amazon's cloud servers. They at that time realized that the cloud was the future of their business. The only problem is that they were on the public cloud. During it allows for massive expansion, it doesn't allow the developer to optimize how the server handles each game.

As infrastructure in other words private to Zynga, zCloud physically resides in our own datacenters and is designed exactly for social games in terms of availability, network connectivity, server processing power and storage throughput.

It doesn't mean that they stopped using Amazon's service, but, as they used both cloud networks to host their games that now had millions of players. They used a new method of cloud computing in that they would use public cloud servers for the initial launch and explosion of players and at the time slowly move everybody over to their private cloud network.