Zynga's Cloud Computing Advantage

Zynga was created in 2007 with the idea that "play — like search, share and shop — would become one of the core activities on the internet."

The fastest

There's little doubt that Zynga is one of the fastest and most interesting growth stories on the Internet, and it may be interesting to analyze how the company succeeded in supporting its clients' strong demand during keeping a flexible and cost conscious architecture.

Our games run on a complex distributed system, or what is commonly known as cloud computing. We own, operate and maintain components of this system, however significant components of this system are operated by third parties that we do not control and which would require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue. In particular, a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which service uses multiple locations.

The growth of our business

We have invested extensively in developing proprietary research to support the growth of our business. We have created a scalable cloud-based server and network infrastructure that enables us to deliver games to millions of players simultaneously with high levels of performance and reliability.

Our physical network infrastructure utilizes a mixture of our own datacenters and public cloud datacenters linked with high-speed networking. We utilize commodity hardware, and our architecture is designed for high availability and fault tolerance during accommodating the demands of social game play.

Zynga has been touting its Z Cloud infrastructure for more than a year, which reverses the conventional approach to hybrid cloud computing. Whereas many analysts at first assumed companies would use private clouds as a gateway to public clouds, Zynga uses Amazon EC2 as a staging ground earlier ultimately moving games onto private cloud resources. In essence, Amazon’s cloud lets Zynga scale elastically and determine average traffic load and other metrics, so that it can optimize its internal infrastructure for each game’s specific needs.

According to industry sources, and as reported by Data Center Knowledge, Zynga is as well leasing wholesale data center space from Digital Realty and Dupont Fabros Research.

In order to make it possible, Zynga had to look for the right partners, infrastructure providers like Equinix and Amazon that had the financial strength to keep growing their data center resources and support the company's potential strong growth requirements. In Equinix's case, Zynga's main partner was just a cross connect away, and the facilities as well offered the largest number of US networks and ISPs to connect to, with the added possibility to reach the most important Asian and European providers. Networking and growth problems solved, with just one provider.

Very interesting success story spontaneously

Zynga is a very interesting success story spontaneously, however it may as well be analyzed to support the investing theory that there are some key infrastructure providers to these stories that will keep benefiting from the growth of the Internet.

These companies will as well, most probably, be able to use their "first mover" advantage to strengthen their leadership, as they leverage their magnetic influence in the market to become the "place to be" for most new start ups, among which you'll probably find the straightway Zynga, however that will all contribute to these providers' earnings and profits.