The Return to the Cloud | Perspectives

Excerpt from a timely cloud reality check by Amazon's James Hamilton

"This week more news came available when Robert McMillan of the Wall Street Journal wrote For Zynga, A Journey from Cloud to Home — and Back Again. In this article, Zynga is reported to have spent over $100m on a private cloud infrastructure and yet decided to return to the cloud all in. This decision is partly interesting because the previous move was so well publicized but mostly because Zynga has incredible visibility into both the on premise and public cloud world since they have run both at very high scale for several years.

The article quotes Zynga CEO Mark Pincus during the last investors call “There’s a lot of places that are not strategic for us to have scale and we think not appropriate, like running our own data centers. We’re going to let Amazon do that.” The articles continues by saying “The company Wednesday said it would shut its data centers and shift its computing workload back to Amazon, as part of $100 million in spending reductions.”

This announcement is interesting because Zygna has a very large infrastructure investment just as most large enterprises have. And yet, even with that large infrastructure investment, they still elected to move to fully to the cloud. What was an example that challenged cloud economics at the very high end of the scale, has now become an example of a company with a deep understanding of both cloud and on premise deployments at scale, deciding to fully commit to the cloud."

The Return to the Cloud | Perspectives