Zynga Shuts its Data Centers, Returns to Amazon

Remember those Farmville and Cityville game requests on Facebook? Its creator, Zynga is provider of social game services which for various platforms like social networking sites to Smartphone like Android, iOS and Windows Phone. They had to change their business because it did not work out as planned. Games are unpredictable. The world has moved from those web-based Facebook offerings to Mobile games.

They were Amazon’s customer of cloud-computing services, but then they built their own Data Center because its operation cost were cheaper than paying Amazon. But the price to performance ratio did not meet the expectation and it took $100 Million to build those Data Centers, meaning they now they have to shut it down and move back to Amazon’s services “Running a data center is expensive, there are lots of mouths to feed when you have your own data center.”, he said.

“There’s a lot of places that are not strategic for us to have scale and we think not appropriate, like running our own data centers, We are going to let Amazon do that.” Zynga CEO Mark Pincus told investors on a conference call.

When Zynga built its Data Centers back in 2011 they were still dependent on Amazon for some tasks. A software called zCloud was created for Data Centers. It was made on open-source software called Cloud Stack. It enabled them to easily switch between Amazon’s servers to their own. Zynga may have simply decided that it wanted to be a gaming company, not a technology company.

Thank you Wall Street Journal for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Compstak.