The zCloud has two man server types for running games. 'They're not four-door sedans.' He says that Zynga's particular architecture, called zCloud, needs two-thirds the machines to run games than AWS does. 'Our servers are optimized for game performance,' Leinwand told me. Today, as Zynga announces its platform strategy, it becomes clear why Zynga trotted Leinwand out for press interviews two weeks ago: Zynga wants developers to know that it has the muscle to run whatever games they can throw at it, and more importantly, that Zynga can act as their shock absorber should their games expand as rapidly as they hope. 'The public cloud is the shock absorber,' Leinwand says, before he repeats a mantra common to data center wonks: 'Own the base.

As of December 2011, Zynga was running 80 percent of its games on its hardware and 20 percent on AWS. Zynga announced at the Cloud Connect conference in February that it had built out its own data center architecture and had successfully moved back into its own house. Only 20 percent was on servers that Zynga owned.īut at Zynga scale, using that infrastructure became inefficient, according to Zynga's CTO of infrastructure, Allan Leinwand, who I spoke with earlier in February. By January 2011, AWS was handling 80 percent of Zynga's load.

Zynga used Amazon Web Services, and over time, shunted more and more of the day-to-day load of running its games to AWS. In 2009, when FarmVille started taking off-it grew to 10 million daily active users in six weeks, 25 million in five months-the company began to lean heavily on rented resources to handle the load. Zynga was once a big buyer of cloud computing services.

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