puppet labs “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

Industry:

Case Study
PUPPET ENABLES ZYNGA
TO RAPIDLY SCALE ITS
INFRASTRUCTURE

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.

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.

STARTING ENVIRONMENT

KEY OBJECTIVES

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

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

puppet labs “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

Case Study
BENEFITS OBTAINED
• Speed of Deployment - Puppet has provided significant time savings in the way the operations team delivers services for the gaming studios.
• Consistency of Servers – 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.”
• 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.
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