Zynga

Zynga, the fine folks that bring us Farmville, Cityville and about a zillion other social network games, gave a presentation on their use of clouds. Here's a few interesting facts from that session:

Cityville went from 0 to 100 million users in 40 days. Think about the logistics of provisioning servers for something with that much growth!

1 out of 5 Americans play social games.

Farmville's success was the catalyst that caused Zynga to move to the cloud in 2009. They literally couldn't rack servers fast enough to keep up with the growing demand.

Zynga's original response was to design and build a private cloud that they call ZCloud. Zcloud went from concept to production in less than 6 months.

Zynga can and has fully provisioned over 1000 physical servers in 24 hours.

Between January of 2009 and January of 2011 the number of servers that Zynga use has increased by factor of 75!

Now, Zynga uses both Zcloud and AWS(Amazon Web Services). So they are using both a Private and a Public cloud. They use a single app to provision servers in both and dynamically move servers from one to the other. They try to build ZCloud up to deal with the minimum demand and use AWS for the spikes.