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Release early and often. A/B testing. Creating a landing page and buying ads on AdSense. All are ways of providing quick feedback in order to validate an idea. If you are like Zynga, with 250 million active users a month, how do you cost effectively prove out a game that could flop or get 90 million users (like CityVille) in an instant?
Zynga handles this problem inlle an innovative way, by inverting the typical cloud burst scenario that has excess traffic flowing from a datacenter to a cloud, to having a game start in the cloud and then moving to the datacenter once the game has proved popular enough to keep.
This process is nicely described by Charles Babcock in Lessons From FarmVille: How Zynga Uses The Cloud, in an interview with Allan Leinwand, CTO of infrastructure engineering at Zynga.
When paired down to its essence, Zynga's strategy goes something like this:
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