Zynga games are in need of infrastructure

"Landep News"

Zynga games are in need of infrastructure

Zynga decided that it’s time to build for its 281 million users per month an infrastructure that will secure its position as one of the most important operators of cloud computing in the world.

Not many details are known about Zynga. What’s known is that Zynga’s a social game giant that is also specialized in cloud computing and is now ready to invest up to $150 million in an advanced infrastructure that until now was provided by Amazon Web Services. After only four years in the business in which the company has registered an impressive success due to games like FarmVille which people can play on Facebook, the shareholders are confident enough to risk making such an investment.

Most of the game companies which design applications for Facebook use the services of Amazon for the hardware infrastructure, but Zynga it’s not like any other company. Its applications have the gift of being scalable even if an enormous number of users start playing the game in a short period of time.

For example, even if Zynga wasn’t the first game designer that thought about farm simulations, it managed to pass the Farm Town game which was released before FarmVille, but because it lacked the scalability feature couldn’t support more than 10 million users. Zynga made a smart move when it decided to invest in a special engine that helped the company keep up the great performance as the number of users increased on a daily basis. Some credit for this success must also be given to Amazon.

But even in the current situation the company isn’t doing bad at all. In 24 hours, if necessary, they can add 1,000 new servers and satisfy the demands of all their users by being able to provide a petabyte of data each day.

Many ask themselves if Zynga doesn’t want to do business with Amazon anymore. The officials never suggested that they want to get rid of the middle-man, but said that their dependence on Amazon is a potential risk they can avoid by investing in their own infrastructure. In addition, considering that most of their games have been successful on the market, if they exceed the computing power they ordered they will have to face higher costs. On the other hand, if the situation changes overnight and Zynga is left to confront the reality of unpopular games, it will record serious losses due to its investment in a now unnecessary infrastructure. This is a reason why it’s very likely that Zynga will choose to be the owner of some of its data centers and seek the help of external hosts for the other resources necessary.

What’s commendable it’s the desire of Zynga’s leaders to advance and play in the big league with companies like Google or Apple that also own private data centers. But is Zynga as popular as Google or Apple? Did you ever play a Zynga game?

Thank's for link:

Tweet