UPDATED 13:11 EDT / MAY 08 2012

Latest from InterOp: Zynga’s in-house AWS

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.

 


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Support our open free content by sharing and engaging with our content and community.

Join theCUBE Alumni Trust Network

Where Technology Leaders Connect, Share Intelligence & Create Opportunities

11.4k+  
CUBE Alumni Network
C-level and Technical
Domain Experts
15M+ 
theCUBE
Viewers
Connect with 11,413+ industry leaders from our network of tech and business leaders forming a unique trusted network effect.

SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation serving innovative audiences and brands, bringing together cutting-edge technology, influential content, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — such as those established in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology, and AI. .

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a powerful ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands, with a reach of 15+ million elite tech professionals. The company’s new, proprietary theCUBE AI Video cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.