Page 235 -

234 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure

Should Businesses Move to the Cloud?

CASE STUDY

C loud computing has just begun to take off than ever, companies are turning to cloud computing

in the business world. The biggest player
providers like these for their computing resources.
Zynga is a good example of a company using cloud
in the cloud computing marketplace is one
you might not expect: Amazon. Under its computing to improve its business in a new way.
Web Services division (AWS), Amazon has streamlined Zynga is the developer of wildly popular Facebook
cloud computing and made it an affordable and sensi- applications like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and many
ble option for companies ranging from tiny Internet- others. With over 290 million monthly active users,
start-ups to established companies like FedEx. Zynga’s computing demands are already signifi-
AWS provides subscribing companies with flexible cant. When Zynga releases a new game, however, it
computing power and data storage, as well as data has no way of knowing what amount of computing
management, messaging, payment, and other resources to dedicate to the game. The game might
services that can be used together or individually be a mild success, or a smash hit that adds millions
as the business requires. Anyone with an Internet of new users. The ability to design applications that
connection and a little bit of money can harness can scale up in the number of users quickly is one of
the same computing systems that Amazon itself Zynga’s competitive advantages.
uses to run its now $48 billion a year retail business. Because of the uncertainty surrounding resource
To make the process of harnessing the cloud usage for new game launches, Zynga uses Amazon’s
simpler, Amazon added an automated service called cloud computing platform to launch new offerings.
CloudFormation that helps customers get the right That way, it can pay only for the resources it ends up
amount of computing resources. Customers provide using, and once game traffic stabilizes and reaches a
the amount of server space, bandwidth, storage, steady number of users, Zynga moves the game onto
and any other services they require, and AWS can its private zCloud, which is structurally similar to
automatically allocate those resources. Amazon’s cloud, but operates under Zynga’s control
Since its launch in March 2006, AWS has contin- in data centers on the East and West coasts. Zynga’s
ued to grow in popularity, with $1 billion in business own servers handle 80 percent of its games. (Zynga
in 2011 and hundreds of thousands of customers recently started selling extra capacity on zCloud
across the globe. In fact, Amazon believes that AWS to other game-makers.) To streamline the process
will someday become more valuable than its vaunted of moving application data from Amazon to the
retail operation. Amazon’s sales pitch is that you zCloud, Zynga has automated many computing tasks,
don’t pay a monthly or yearly fee to use their com- selected hardware and chip configurations that are
puting resources—instead, you pay for exactly what very similar to Amazon’s, and makes significant use
you use. For many businesses, this is an appealing of virtualization.
proposition because it allows Amazon to handle all There are a few reasons why Zynga is well- suited
of the maintenance and upkeep of IT infrastructures, to use this combination of public and private clouds.
leaving businesses to spend more time on higher- The first is its business model, which involves games
value work. that have a tendency to be boom or bust. Rather
The difference between cloud computing today than spending on computing resources of its own
and the cloud computing of the past is the scale before the launch of each game, it’s much more
of today’s clouds and the amount of digital data cost-effective to use Amazon’s cloud services until
requiring storage. This number has increased Zynga can more accurately predict the computing
exponentially in the past few years. Web companies power it needs. As a recent start-up, Zynga lacks
used to build dozens of data centers, often up to a the accumulated legacy systems and infrastruc-
half a billion dollars in cost per center. Leading cloud ture typically found in older companies. The more
companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft systems a company has, the tougher it is to integrate
have built software that uses automated methods to its applications and data with cloud systems.
spread data across the globe and control thousands Although the consequences for server downtime
of servers, and they have refined data center designs are not as catastrophic for Zynga as they would
with the goal of increasing efficiency. Now, more be for a financial services firm, Zynga still needs

MIS_13_Ch_05_Global.indd 234 1/17/2013 3:04:30 PM