Cadir Lee (CTO Zynga) quoted in a VentureBeat post:

It’s not the amount of hardware that matters. It’s the architecture of the application. You have to work at making your app architecture so that it takes advantage of Amazon. You have to have complete fluidity with the storage tier, the web tier. We are running our own data centers. We are looking more at doing our own data centers with more of a private cloud.

Couple of thoughts:

1. Zynga is going the opposite direction than Netflix. While Netflix is focusing (by using Amazon for most of their infrastructure), Zynga is diversifying (building their own data centers) .
2. Zynga’s applications are great examples of where fully distributed NoSQL databases fit. Availability is key.
3. My answer to the question: “how many Zyngas are out there” would be: “enough to ensure some good business for the most reliable and scalable distributed databases”
4. Zynga has contributed and is an investor in Membase, the company that merged with CouchOne to form Couchbase. But Zynga was using a custom version of Membase.
5. Zynga also operates a large MySQL cluster.
6. Zynga processes over 15 terabytes of game data every day (according to their SEC filing ). That’s Hadoop sweet spot.

PS: I’d love to talk to someone from Zynga about their data storage approach. If you have any connections I’d really appreciate an introduction.

Original title and link: Zynga, Data Centers, Polyglot Persistence, and Big Data (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Bradford Stephens^[1] talking distributed systems:

Building distributed systems is painful. Many organizations are approaching the point where their data and application infrastructures are being run on many servers (in the cloud or datacenter). Our software practices don’t reflect that, often with disastrous results. This talk is a collection of scalability principles, anecdotes and practices from experts (and personal experience) from engineering, operations, and business perspectives.