Gigaom has a story on a presentation by Mark Williams, VP of Network Operations for Zynga, the company behind FarmVille and other social games. Williams describes how the company was able to keep up with FarmVille’s growth of one million users per week by using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instead of using actual physical hardware:
At the time of FarmVille’s launch, Zynga had just run out of data center space, so the company had to use Amazon’s EC2. That circumstance-based decision was extremely lucky, Williams said; given the game’s huge growth, without Amazon FarmVille would have failed. Amazon allowed Williams to “acquire instances at will” using RightScale, which he called “absolutely key.” Zynga uses Apache PHP on the front end, memcached for active user play and MySQL on the back end. It uses memcached to store key value pairs to deal with active user play during sessions and then later writes it to disk.
Zynga later moves some of the players to its own hardware once growth becomes predicable.
Microsoft Windows Azure and Google AppEngine are two competitors to Amazon EC2 and it’s partner service Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).