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Annoyed by FarmVille, Mafia Wars, or FrontierVille? Thank Portland’s Puppet Labs for helping configure Zynga’s servers.

Puppet Labs’ open source server configuration management product Puppet helps Zynga scale more effectively by enabling them to configure thousands of servers almost instantaneously.

Rick Turoczy on October 20, 2010

[HTML3]If you’ve ever spent any time online at all, you’ve likely encountered someone who wanted you to help them buy a cow or join a mafia family or survive Oregon Trail 2.0 without dying of dynsentery. Because Zynga‘s games are some of the most popular games online.

But without Portland-based Puppet Labs, that might not be the case. You see, Puppet Labs’ open source server configuration management product Puppet helps Zynga scale more effectively by enabling them to configure thousands of servers almost instantaneously.

Every month, more than 215 million people play games made by Zynga — that’s 10 percent of the world’s internet population enjoying Farmville, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, FrontierVille and more. TechCrunch reported in September that Zynga’s properties move 1 petabyte of data every day and are adding as many as 1,000 servers each week. To accommodate their growing traffic, Zynga uses Puppet for configuration management for their tens of thousands of machines.

One petabyte of data. 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That’s one million gigs of data to you and me. Every day. And all thanks, in no small part, to Puppet helping configure those servers.

How cool is that? Portland companies are winding up helping, powering, and developing some pretty major pursuits. And we’re still just getting started.

So every time you get another annoying notification for one of those games? Thank Puppet Labs.

For more, see the Puppet Labs case study on Zynga. Want to help Puppet Labs do more cool things like this? Well, you’re in luck. Puppet Labs is hiring.

Oh I’m sorry. You. There in the back. You had a question? What’s server configuration management, you say? Well, I’m oft reminded of this blisteringly awesome configuration management panel from Open Source Bridge 2009, which includes Puppet Labs Luke Kanies. It may help you get up to speed.

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Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy

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