Hybrid cloud case study

In order to fully understand, let us take the case of a company called Zynga. If you are not aware of it, it's a company that makes free online games for social media platforms such as Facebook. There are several games that Zynga makes, a notable few are Farmville, HitItRich Cityville, Poker, Mafia Wars, and so on. 

If you are on Facebook, you must have played some of them. If you haven't, then you must have at least received a lot of requests from these games through your friends. At one point, Zynga were adding five new players a second. 

When it was founded over a decade ago, in April of 2007, it did not have enough capital to start a data center of its own, and the natural fit was the public cloud. In 2009, Farmville had 10 million active daily users (running over 10000 instances).

In 2011, Zynga built its own data centers and hosted its private cloud, zCloud, for simple cost reasons, as discussed in a previous part of this chapter. 

In 2015, it returned to AWS (to innovate for the mobile platform) and eventually started using both the public and private cloud in a way so as to maximize cost benefits and innovation, therefore creating a hybrid cloud set-up.