[fserb]

The story is interesting, but I still can't figure out why having both their own servers and EC2 splitting 50/50 is a good idea. If EC2 dies the private server won't be able to handle all the traffic and FarmVille will stop working. If the private servers die, they will have a little hiccup until they manage to rescale EC2 and everything will be back to normal. With this system, in practice they already fully depend on EC2 and have an extra point of potential failure. What am I missing?

[dugmartin]

The might just be amortizing the cost of the servers they already bought in their data center prior to moving to EC2.

[unwind]

Probably that the cost per player is higher on EC2, so they want to be able to migrate games that have stopped growing unpredictably to their own infrastructure.

[ecuzzillo]

They did say they didn't want to test Amazon's capacity. Also, presumably, running on their own servers is cheaper.

[dalore]

EC2 is actually broken down into a few completely different clouds. If they only used one EC2 location they would be silly.

I agree, they really shouldn't use/need their private servers, but I suspect its a data control issue.

[smokinn]

I doubt it's a question of data control.

EC2 is significantly more expensive than running your own servers so it's a good idea to keep close to your base load on your own servers and then just scale up/down as necessary with EC2. This way you're optimizing your cost per player.