We just really wanted to own the base of that infrastructure."īut what does zCloud mean for the players? For one, it gives Zynga's game makers less to worry about, and thus more opportunities to (hopefully) try new things. And the players, obviously, didn't notice the difference. We actually have 80 percent of players inside of zCloud and 20 percent outside on Amazon. "And by the end of last year, we flipped that on its head. "In January of 2011, we had 20 percent of players that were actually playing games on zCloud that we owned-80 percent were playing up in Amazon," Leinwand admits. But it's on the verge of becoming its own entity.
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It's a combination of Zynga's own servers with (and modeled to mirror) Amazon's public cloud service. But Zynga wanted to own the infrastructure to support its games, so it moved to what is now the zCloud. You could almost say that FarmVille might not have grown as fast if not for cloud computing. Zynga has used public cloud servers provided by Amazon to support its games in the past, a move prompted by the rapid growth of FarmVille in 2009. As a matter of fact, CastleVille was launched entirely in zCloud, which now serves 80 percent of Zynga's players.
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The less chance that you have of noticing the work behind the scenes, the better for you while knee deep in quests in CastleVille. That's essentially the approach Zynga takes with supporting its many Facebook and mobile games. Zynga CTO of Infrastructure Allan Leinwand