[pwim]

He mentions that FarmVille maintains both their own servers and EC2 servers. That's an interesting approach to maintain some baseline capacity locally and use the cloud for scaling. I suppose its obvious, but usually with the cloud I hear about all or nothing (well or just some specific task in the cloud).

[amitt]

The article is somewhat confusing, for FV we didn't split our servers across ec2 and a data center. games are either fully on ec2 or fully in the data center.

[aristus]

The crux of the problem is data and latency, right? I imagine it's infeasible to have a hybrid architecture the way cloud providers structure their networks and pricing today.

[amitt]

exactly. its the same reason you want to have your databases and application servers in the same data center.

[robryan]

Best of both worlds I guess, I'd imagine they could run it on their own servers a lot cheaper but would get destroyed when a new game peaked. Using the EC2 as overflow they can make the best use out of their own servers rather than buying up big computing power that is only ever used in user spikes.

[bonsaitree]

Yes. An suitable analogy can be made to a hybrid car. Local servers (electric motor & batteries) for constant/idle-demand and EC2 (internal combustion engine) for high bandwidth & storage overflow during version deployments and peak loads.

We actually recommend this solution our clients who already have significant sunk costs and long-term SLA contracts in hardware and datacenter services.