The worlds largest web based application "utilizes primarily open source components" to serve 75 million farmers a month!
OK, don’t be ashamed. Raise your hand if you have staked a claim to your own little piece of land in Farmville on Facebook. What you may not realize is that behind the largest game and web based application in the world beats an open source heart. According to this interview on High Scalability, Luke Rajlich of Farmville developer Zynga says, “In terms of technology investment, FarmVille primarily utilizes open source components and is at its core built off the LAMP stack.”
For those who question the “enterprise scalability” of open source tools, let me point out a few Farmville metrics. Over 75 million people log on to Farmville every month, with over 28 million logging on daily. Whether you have just a small spread of a few squares and a cow or a “mighty big plantation”, you and the minions like you are generating up to 4.5 G/bps of traffic at a time. To give you some perspective, the 75 million players logging on a month is more than the total population of France!
What open source components is Farmville built on? Well it starts with a LAMP stack. So Farmville’s very foundations in terms of OS, data base and programming language are OSS. Other OSS tools used by Zynga,(who BTW also develop Mafia Wars, Petville, Fishville, and Yoville among others) are Nagios for alerting, Munin for monitoring, and Puppet for configuration.
Besides the sheer magnitude of the number of players involved, Farmville has some other unique requirements. Keeping track of the current configuration of each farm is a herculean task. Making sure that when you place a horse it is not occupying the same space as a tree requires a lot of computer resources.
Zynga as the leader in this space has a ton of experience scaling these games up to the performance necessary. I would imagine many of the lessons learned by Zynga will make their way into cloud based applications over the coming months and years. If so, you can be sure that open source software will continue to power the biggest and best web based applications out there.
So the next time you are adopting that lost brown cow or harvesting another crop, you may want to thank the open source software community for bringing a little bit of sunshine onto your corner of the world.
