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Zynga exec exodus continues as gaming company loses infrastructure CTO

Om Malik — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:22:10 +0000

Allan Leinwand, chief technology officer of infrastructure for San Francisco-based social games company Zynga, has left the company, according to an update on his LinkedIn profile page. Leinwand is assuming a similar role at ServiceNow, a company that offers software to automate enterprise IT operations as a service.

Leinwand was once a venture partner at Panorama Capital and founded Vyatta, an open source networking company. He was also the CTO of Digital Island, a content delivery network and CEO of Proficient Networks. Leinwand was one of the key people behind Zynga’s shift away from Amazon’s cloud service to Zynga’s homegrown Z-cloud.

Zynga has been losing senior executives at an alarming rate. Earlier this summer, the company lost about seven executives including Mike Verdu, Zynga’s former chief creative officer and Bill Mooney, who spearheaded the Farmville franchise. Zynga went public at $10 a share and hit an all time high of $14.69 a share in March 2012, but since then has been in a swoon. At close of trading on Friday, Zynga stock stood at $2.88 a share, giving company a market capitalization of $2.19 billion.

Disclosure: Leinwand was an occasional contributor on cloud & infrastructure related topics to our blog before joining Zynga.

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With new Draw Something features, OMGPOP starts move onto Z Cloud

Barb Darrow — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:32:23 +0000

Less than a month after being acquired Zynga OMGPOP is well on its way to being integrated into the giant game maker’s technology roadmap, according to Jason Pearlman, CTO of OMGPOP.

Draw Something, the mobile game sensation that put OMGPOP on the map, is getting new perks this week, including an easy undo feature, two-click posting of drawings to Facebook and Twitter, and messaging that lets users annotate their drawings before sharing them. And some of that work is already being done on Zynga’s internal Z cloud, Pearlman, who is now CTO of Zynga’s new Mobile NY group, said in an interview Tuesday.

Z cloud is Zynga’s internally developed cloud that now runs the bulk of its computing workload. When Zynga started out, 80 percent of its game launch workloads ran on Amazon Web Services, now 20 percent of them do.

Moving fast is nothing new to OMGPOP. When Draw Something debuted in February, there were 30,000 initial downloads. Nine days later, downloads topped a million. To date, there have been 50 million.

“We thought we knew how to scale our backend systems, then Draw Something happened,” Pearlman said. “When we started with it, it was just another game to us. We make as many games as possible as fast as we can. We thought it had potential but had no idea how big it would get.”

It wasn’t as if OMGPOP went all out promoting the game. There was a small media buy, he said, but then people started tweeting about it. “Celebrities started tweeting and atop all that, the people who were signing up and playing weren’t leaving. Our DAUs [daily average users] kept growing and growing.”

Even engineers used to building to scale will tell you it’s hard to tell under these unanticipated loads “when things will start to fall over,” he said.

The OMGPOP back-end guys — Pearlman and two others — met the challenge with brute force. “We started bringing up tons and tons of servers, we ported over all our key value code to a new [non-blocking Ruby-based Goliath] framework and we worked around the clock,” he said. There were other hair-raising tales, about having to rewrite the app and deploy it on a new Couchbase NoSQL cluster and then hitting more issues.

Now Draw Something is up to 3,000 drawings per second. For that reason, Pearlman is really happy to be working with Zynga CTO of infrastructure Allan Leinwand on the strategy for moving more of OMGPOP over to Z cloud.

While there are benefits to working in small, tight-knit groups, there are also advantages to having lots of resources. ”Having Zynga acquire us helps us — instead of spending all night just keeping things up and running, we can work on new features,” he said.

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Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:33:13 +0000

The latest AWS offering to rock the technology establishment is DynamoDB, a NoSQL database service that puts the power of NoSQL in the hands of every developer. This research note analyzes the multiple ways in which Amazon’s announcement has disrupted the big data and cloud computing market and what that means for other companies and offerings in the space — from the startups selling Hadoop distributions to public cloud providers like Rackspace and Microsoft, which will have to scramble to keep up and differentiate. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Cloudant, Heroku and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:01:23 +0000

If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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