In an interview with Zynga’s Luke Rajlich on the High Scalability website one interesting tidbit in the post was their use of Puppet to manage configuration of the web farm for their extremely popular FarmVille game. If you aren’t familiar with Zynga, they are one of the gaming giants on Facebook, offering such mega hits as Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Zynga Poker, and many others. FarmVille alone has 75 million players 28 million of which play daily. In addition at peak traffic times Luke indicated that “roughly 3 Gigabits/sec of traffic go between FarmVille and Facebook while our caching cluster serves another 1.5 Gigabits/sec to the application”.

The article gives some great insights into the challenges of running an online game and how they interact with Facebook. At the end of the post Luke wrote about how he manages their web farm:

To help manage and monitor FarmVille’s web farm, we utilize a number of open source monitoring and management tools. We use nagios for alerting, munin for monitoring, and puppet for configuration. We heavily utilize internal stats systems to track performance of the services the application uses, such as Facebook, DB, and Memcache. Additionally, when we see performance degradation, we profile a request’s IO events on a sampled basis.

It’s good to see Puppet being used in some of the world’s most demanding environment where efficiency, reliability and predictability are essential.

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