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ppet Case Study

PUPPET ENABLES ZYNGA TO RAPIDLY SCALE ITS INFRASTRUCTURE

“Puppet is fantastic at configuration management and everyone is really excited about it. We selected Puppet for its flexibility, features and ease of use.”

- Mark Stockford, Vice President Production Operations, Zynga

STARTING ENVIRONMENT• The production operations team is responsible for

the infrastructure of all Zynga gaming studios and properties, including FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker and FrontierVille. The team supports, maintains, deploys, and configures servers to match the rapid growth of Zynga

• Zynga’s infrastructure includes tens of thousands of servers in both public clouds and private datacenters. They use Linux throughout their datacenters and cloud deployments.

• Early on in Zynga’s development they were using a manual process including Kickstarts and post installs to get hundreds of servers online. They quickly recognized the need for an automated process even before they hit a rapid scaling point.

KEY OBJECTIVES• Scalability&Consistency – Zynga is experiencing

phenomenal growth and its infrastructure needed to keep pace. Script-based solutions and manual approaches were not sufficient for their needs.

• PortableInfrastructure– Zynga needed a way to leverage a consistent configuration management approach in both their public cloud infrastructure and their own datacenters.

• Flexibility – Given the diversity of the various Zynga gaming properties, it was important for the team to be able to quickly match the right configuration to the right machine.

• InfrastructureInsights – As the organization matured, it became more important to have an automated method of visualizing the properties of each machine.

Zynga is the world’s largest social game developer. Every month more than 215 million people play its games. Zynga’s games include FarmVille, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Café World, FishVille, PetVille and FrontierVille. Zynga games are available on Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone.

INDUSTRY: Social Gaming

ChALLENGE: Large Scale Infrastructure

SOLUTION: Puppet with enterprise support and training

RESULTS: Manage tens of thousands of machines while increasing the speed of deployment and recovery, improving the consistency of servers and facilitating internal collaboration.

pulabs

ppet Case Study

BENEFITS OBTAINED• SpeedofDeployment - Puppet has provided significant time savings in the way the

operations team delivers services for the gaming studios.

• ConsistencyofServers– Puppet’s model-driven framework ensures consistent deployments. According to Stockford “It is evident that we have experienced 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.”

• SpeedofRecovery – 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?• SupportsRapidGrowth – With thousands of servers and almost a quarter of a

billion daily users, Zynga needed a proven solution that can match their growth needs.

• EaseofUse – Puppet is designed to fit the way systems administrators work. 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 are using the tool quickly. They understand it. They get it.”

• GreaterFlexibility – Puppet’s model-driven approach provides Zynga with the flexibility to adapt its infrastructure to the diverse needs of its studio system.

• Training&Support – Puppet Labs provides training and enterprise support. Zynga has used both to accelerate and maximize the benefit of using Puppet.

“Puppet Labs is extremely easy to work with and very flexible in their approach. We worked collaboratively with them to conduct training and develop new capabilities.”

- Mark Stockford, Vice President Production Operations, Zynga

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About Puppet LabsPuppet Labs, is the provider of Puppet, an open source platform that automates configuration management and provisioning. With more than 100 customers and thousands of users including Digg, Genentech, Match.com, 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.

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