Case Study: Zynga achieves cost savings and faster game performance with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Zynga - Customer Case Study

Zynga, the San Francisco–based social and mobile games company behind hits like Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, and FarmVille, faced a challenge when it moved from AWS to its own private cloud (zCloud) in 2011. As mobile gaming rose and legacy hardware aged, the company found maintaining its data centers costly, inflexible, and unable to keep pace with rapid technology innovation and changing player demand.

Zynga gradually reengaged with AWS—using EC2, S3, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, RDS, VPC, and AWS Support—running careful proofs of concept and migrating analytics and game services. The move shrank infrastructure footprints (analytics clusters from 230→115→70 nodes), enabled data-center closures and cost reductions, cut Words With Friends database servers from 100 to 3 and application servers by 33%, moved MySQL workloads to managed DynamoDB, and improved query times from 30 seconds to 1 second—freeing IT to experiment and focus on game innovation and player experience.

Zynga

Dorion Carroll

Chief Information Officer