Also at the Cit­rix Syn­ergy con­fer­ence Simon Crosby intro­duced a mys­tery speaker who turned out to be Allan Lein­wand, Zynga’s Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer — Infra­struc­ture who told a fas­ci­nat­ing story of scale. Zynga’s games include Far­mville and Words With Friends. The demand on Zynga’s infra­struc­ture is amaz­ing — 250 mil­lion monthly active users, five new play­ers join Zynga every sec­ond, over 10% of the world’s Inter­net pop­u­la­tion plays Zynga games every month. To make things really dif­fi­cult, it’s hard to pre­dict how fast a new game might grow. Let’s say they launch a new game on a Mon­day. They have no idea what the demand will be on Fri­day. If the game is a flop, they won’t need much infra­struc­ture. If it’s a suc­cess and goes viral, the demand on the infra­struc­ture could be huge — Words With Friends processes 1,000 moves a sec­ond. Early on the com­pany couldn’t grow its infra­struc­ture (space, cool­ing, servers, net­work­ing equip­ment and tran­sit) fast enough. The scal­ing is amaz­ing — for every one server they had in Jan­u­ary 09 they had 75 just two years later. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Far­mville which in 2009 grew to 25 mil­lion daily active users in just five months — a growth rate that was impos­si­ble for them to grow out their phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture that quickly — so they made a quick move to start using Amazon’s AWS. Real­iz­ing they were trad­ing between oper­a­tional expense and cap­i­tal expense they decided to build their own pri­vate cloud which they call zcloud — fast scal­ing, open source, Xen, X86 archi­tec­ture — which uses RightScale to pro­vi­sion ser­vices on both their pri­vate cloud and Ama­zon. Zynga’s growth is an inter­est­ing exam­ple of how quickly things have changed in the infra­struc­ture world on both the demand size (sup­port­ing users) and the sup­ply side (pro­vid­ing server cycles). This would have been a com­pletely dif­fer­ent story five years ago with the out­come cost­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to pro­vi­sion infra­struc­ture ahead of demand. Who knows, maybe their next game is going to be “infra­struc­ture scal­ing with friends” for all of us infra­struc­ture geeks to play around with appli­ca­tion demand and server avail­abil­ity (Humm, that’s not such a bad idea…)