"Zynga found it could do the same amount of work in its private cloud as it had been doing on Amazon EC2--but with only one-third the number of servers. It's a startling statistic, and how they did it bears explanation.

The comparison is oranges to oranges, when you consider that Zynga runs one virtual machine per physical server, whether the server is running on Amazon's EC2 or in Zynga's zCloud. Unlike Amazon, however, Zynga engineered its zCloud servers so they were optimized for different roles within its gaming software infrastructure--database access, Web server, or game logic execution. Of necessity, Amazon EC2 servers are general purpose machines, designed to run a wide variety of workloads, not do one job supremely well."

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