Zynga and the cloud

InformationWeek's Charles Babcock describes soon-to-be-public game-maker Zynga's "unusual cloud strategy" in a new piece. The article is a good introduction to Zynga for those like me, who know nothing of Farmville except the name. Zynga's dependence on Facebook is well-known, but Babcock considers the company's strategic dependence on Amazon Web Services to be just as important but often overlooked. Zynga, moreover, uses Amazon's cloud in an unusual way.

For the most part, the hybrid cloud has been viewed as a place for cloud bursting, a destination for offloading enterprise workloads when their need for compute cycles exceeds what's available in the enterprise data center. Zynga uses the cloud upfront, when the workload is most unpredictable; only later does it bring into its operations--once it has reached either a steady state of growth or steady state of use.

Zynga starts a new game on Amazon's cloud, when no one knows what demand for the game will be, and only switches the game to internally-controlled servers when it has a good read on what the sustained load is. That allows Zynga to keep its infrastructure costs under control: it doesn't have to guess blindly how much hardware to purchase.

To my mind, that's the most important insight Babcock brings to the table. He spends much of the rest of the article ominously warning that Zynga is vulnerable to disruptions in Amazon's cloud infrastructure, but it's an absurd concern. No server infrastructure is immune to partial or even total failure, and it's misleading for Babcock to imply, as he does, that bringing services in-house would make Zynga less vulnerable to disruptions. I haven't heard anyone claim that Amazon's cloud services are poorly managed. There's no reason to assume that Zynga could or would do a significantly better job.

Seeing as all games eventually dwindle in appeal, I wonder how Zynga plans to manage its server hardware infrastructure over time, as games like Farmville become less popular and require less hardware to support them.