One of the newest highlights of the InterOp gathering held this week at Las Vegas is the Zynga keynote, in which the company detailed its own cloud use case, Wikibon’s David Cahill attended and reported his observations  from the showroom floor.

The social game developer has a lot of users to support – one in ten people with access to the internet play a Zynga game at least once a month, and there are approximately 250 million active monthly users that play on a regular basis. Powering all this activity requires a lot of resources.

The keynote covered the company’s gradual shift to the cloud: when the player base first started to expand Zynga started relying on Amazon Web Services to facilitate smoother scaling, and later it implemented the AWS model to its own infrastructure.

The private cloud that is the backbone of the developer’s games is nicknamed zCloud, and is virtualized by Citrix XenServer. AWS is evidently still very much in the picture, and both the deployments are managed via RightScale’s cloud management platform.

“Zynga shared some impressive statistics around its zCloud build. The entire project went from concept to production in <6 months. Zynga, in concert with RightScale, can now fully provision >1,000 physical servers in 24 hours. From a growth standpoint, between Jan ’09 and Jan ’11 it has a 75x’ed server count.”

One important emphasis  of the case study is the broader-picture ‘branding’ of zCloud – a commodity cloud rather than an enterprise one; Cahill noted the bottom line differences in his piece. And an earlier report from Wikibon also explored another trend in the enterprise cloud: flash, which has the potential of disrupting ‘entire industries.’

Yesterday when InterOp was just kicking off we covered a few product announcements from a number of companies that are also attending the event.  Google’s low-latency HTTP standard for mobile development seems to be picking up momentum, and Huawei debuted what it says is the fastest switch to date.