Zynga chose AWS to support its hyper growth and handle traffic spikes for popular games like FarmVille. AWS provided on-demand scalability through services like EC2, S3, EBS, and CloudFront, allowing Zynga to quickly add 500 new servers during a 50% spike in FarmVille traffic within 30 minutes. Zynga used EC2 for web and database servers, S3 for static assets, and EBS for persistent MySQL storage. Lessons learned included planning for massive scalability across load balancers, web servers, memcached, and database shards, as well as designing for failure and using tools for automation and monitoring.