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.

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.