
How Zynga Survived FarmVille - mattjung
http://gigaom.com/2010/06/08/how-zynga-survived-farmville/
======
pwim
He mentions that FarmVille maintains both their own servers and EC2 servers.
That's an interesting approach to maintain some baseline capacity locally and
use the cloud for scaling. I suppose its obvious, but usually with the cloud I
hear about all or nothing (well or just some specific task in the cloud).

~~~
amitt
The article is somewhat confusing, for FV we didn't split our servers across
ec2 and a data center. games are either fully on ec2 or fully in the data
center.

~~~
aristus
The crux of the problem is data and latency, right? I imagine it's infeasible
to have a hybrid architecture the way cloud providers structure their networks
and pricing today.

~~~
amitt
exactly. its the same reason you want to have your databases and application
servers in the same data center.

------
fserb
The story is interesting, but I still can't figure out why having both their
own servers and EC2 splitting 50/50 is a good idea. If EC2 dies the private
server won't be able to handle all the traffic and FarmVille will stop
working. If the private servers die, they will have a little hiccup until they
manage to rescale EC2 and everything will be back to normal. With this system,
in practice they already fully depend on EC2 and have an extra point of
potential failure. What am I missing?

~~~
dalore
EC2 is actually broken down into a few completely different clouds. If they
only used one EC2 location they would be silly.

I agree, they really shouldn't use/need their private servers, but I suspect
its a data control issue.

~~~
smokinn
I doubt it's a question of data control.

EC2 is significantly more expensive than running your own servers so it's a
good idea to keep close to your base load on your own servers and then just
scale up/down as necessary with EC2. This way you're optimizing your cost per
player.

