Zynga Puppet Case Study
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Zynga, the world's largest social game developer, needed a solution to manage their rapidly growing infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers across private datacenters and public clouds. They selected Puppet for its flexibility, ease of use, and ability to deploy and manage configurations at scale. Using Puppet, Zynga was able to standardize servers, improve deployment and recovery speed, and facilitate collaboration across their organization while scaling to support over 215 million monthly active users.
Zynga Puppet Case Study
- 1. puppet labs Case Study “Puppet is fantastic at configuration management and everyone is really excited about it. We selected PUPPET ENABLES ZYNGA Puppet for its flexibility, features and ease of use.” - Mark Stockford, Vice President Production Operations, Zynga TO RAPIDLY SCALE ITS INDUSTRY: INFRASTRUCTURE Social Gaming Zynga is the world’s ChALLENGE: Large Scale Infrastructure largest social game developer. SOLUTION: Puppet with enterprise Every month more than 215 million support and training people play its games. Zynga’s RESULTS: games include FarmVille, Treasure Manage tens of thousands Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, of machines while YoVille, Café World, FishVille, increasing the speed of PetVille and FrontierVille. Zynga deployment and recovery, games are available on Facebook, improving the consistency MySpace and the iPhone. of servers and facilitating internal collaboration. STARTING ENVIRONMENT KEY OBJECTIVES • The production operations team is responsible for • Scalability & Consistency – Zynga is experiencing the infrastructure of all Zynga gaming studios and phenomenal growth and its infrastructure needed properties, including FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga to keep pace. Script-based solutions and manual Poker and FrontierVille. The team supports, maintains, approaches were not sufficient for their needs. deploys, and configures servers to match the rapid • Portable Infrastructure – Zynga needed a way to growth of Zynga leverage a consistent configuration management • Zynga’s infrastructure includes tens of thousands of approach in both their public cloud infrastructure and servers in both public clouds and private datacenters. their own datacenters. They use Linux throughout their datacenters and cloud • Flexibility – Given the diversity of the various Zynga deployments. gaming properties, it was important for the team to be • Early on in Zynga’s development they were using a able to quickly match the right configuration to the right manual process including Kickstarts and post installs to machine. get hundreds of servers online. They quickly recognized • Infrastructure Insights – As the organization matured, the need for an automated process even before they hit a it became more important to have an automated method rapid scaling point. of visualizing the properties of each machine.
- 2. puppet labs Case Study “Puppet Labs is extremely easy to work with and BENEFITS OBTAINED very flexible in their • Speed of Deployment - Puppet has provided significant time savings in the way the approach. We worked operations team delivers services for the gaming studios. collaboratively with them • Consistency of Servers – Puppet’s model-driven framework ensures consistent to conduct training and deployments. According to Stockford “It is evident that we have experienced develop new capabilities.” time savings. The beauty of using Puppet is that it allows us to deliver consistent configurations across our servers in a short period every time.” - Mark Stockford, Vice President Production Operations, Zynga • Speed of Recovery – The production operations team can rapidly deploy the right configuration to the right box. If a system gets inappropriately reconfigured Puppet will automatically revert it back to a known good state, or provide the details necessary to manually remediate a system rapidly. • Collaboration - Having a model-driven approach makes it easy to share configurations across the organization, enabling developers and operations teams to work together to ensure new service delivery is of extremely high quality. Over a dozen people from Zynga’s team have attended Puppet Labs training. This knowledge has been disseminated throughout the team and to the operations people within each individual gaming studio. WhY PUPPET? • Supports Rapid Growth – With thousands of servers and almost a quarter of a billion daily users, Zynga needed a proven solution that can match their growth needs. • Ease of Use – Puppet is designed to fit the way systems administrators work. About Puppet Labs Stockford saw first hand how Puppet can be shared across an organization. He adds, “It’s a pretty straight forward learning curve. We can on-board somebody and they Puppet Labs, is the provider of Puppet, an open source platform are using the tool quickly. They understand it. They get it.” that automates configuration • Greater Flexibility – Puppet’s model-driven approach provides Zynga with the management and provisioning. flexibility to adapt its infrastructure to the diverse needs of its studio system. With more than 100 customers and thousands of users including • Training & Support – Puppet Labs provides training and enterprise support. Zynga Digg, Genentech, Match.com, has used both to accelerate and maximize the benefit of using Puppet. NYU, Oracle and Sun, Shopzilla, Stanford University, SugarCRM and Twitter, Puppet takes the pain out of manually configuring servers by providing systems administrators with a simplified, reusable platform. www.puppetlabs.com 877-575-9775 411 NW Park Avenue, 5th floor Portland OR 97209 © 2010 Puppet Labs All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.