Five years ago, the social gaming company Zynga was cruising along with a fairly standard IT infrastructure. Servers were racked and stacked in a retail data center where Zynga rented space. Customer demand for games like Zynga Poker, launched in 2007, was being met.

Then along came FarmVille. After the game’s 2009 release, 10 million users were hitting FarmVille servers within six weeks, and 25 million within five months.

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