OMGPOP’s Draw Something Explodes Thanks To Open Source CouchBase

Have you played Draw Something yet? It is sort of like the old Pictionary game, except you draw on your phone orcomputer. Don’t worry if you haven’t. Before today I didn’t either. But within the first month of its release the game was downloaded 50 million times. By eight weeks there were 15 million players a week playing it, generating over 2 billion drawings a week. That kind of growth is crazy explosive. Many companies can only hope and dream of such numbers.

But there is a dark side to that kind of growth. Like the old IBM commercial, if you are not ready for that kind of scale, that kind of growth can crater your young company and your 15 minutes of fame is over pretty quickly. What is worse, having fumbled your big chance, you probably don’t get another bite at the apple. So you have to make sure your systems and technology can handle that kind of volume.

But that is not what happened to OMGPOP the makers of Draw Something. They successfully parlayed the phenomenal growth of Draw Something into a 200 million dollar acquisition by Zynga!  Congrats to them on the sale.  

But I am sure the OMGPOP team is themselves thanking the team over at Couchbase. OMGPOP used the Couchbase NoSQL database to handle the massive scale that was demanded here. The Couchbase team has published an infographic about the growth and server/software needs of Draw Something.  It is a pretty impressive drawing itself (no pun intended).

Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold has a good blog post explaining how Couchbase helped and just how big a job this was. I spoke with Bob this morning about this. While Bob says that perhaps you could have used a traditional relational database to handle this kind of load, it would be a lot of work. Also the fact that this was done with little to no downtime using Couchbase is astounding.  In terms of other NoSQL, Bob says Couchbase really is the leader for this kind of scalability and this type of case is a great example why. 

Another interesting thing about this case is that OMGPOP started as just another free user of the community version of Couchbase. Only when they saw the growth coming did they engage Couchbase for professional services and other paid services. So who says that free open source software is not fully functional?

In the meantime, OMGPOP is drawing nice dollar signs thanks to open source NoSQL technology from Couchbase.

BTW, if the infographic is too small for you to read you can go here to see a bigger version of this.