As of May 2009, Playfish had more than 27 million active monthly users and has multiple games in the top 10 on Facebook. The growth and scalability of the company’s games is powered using virtual infrastructure from Amazon Web Services.

With the widespread, accelerated adoption rate of Facebook and social gaming throughout the world, Playfish’s business model is tailor made for cloud computing. “With the high growth nature of our business, we were looking for a cloud solution to enable us to scale fast,” says Sami Lababidi, CTO of Playfish.

Playfish’s infrastructure operates entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), primarily using Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudFront. Amazon’s distributed infrastructure across US, Europe and Asia ideally addresses Playfish’s technological needs by enabling quick and reliable delivery of games to millions of players.

“Playfish has demanding infrastructure needs and Amazon allows us to focus on our business and reducing operational overhead greatly. The capex cost savings are also significant,” states Lababidi. “We often experience dramatic growth due to the way social graphs expand, and it can sometimes happen in a matter of days. This recently occurred during the beta launch of our latest game, Restaurant City, which quickly attracted more than 4 million players in less than 8 weeks. We initially projected between 100k to 250k players, so we were taken a bit by surprise. Using Amazon meant that we were able to scale our infrastructure seamlessly while keeping everyone’s concentration on our core business.”

Lababidi praises the low complexity offered by Amazon Web Services both from a technology perspective and in terms of customer support. “Amazon offers a first class service. The support is fantastic and we’re happy to only deal with one party for all our IT needs versus having to deal with a half a dozen parties if we were running a traditional setup,” says Lababidi. Asked what advice he would pass on to developers or other early stage start ups, Lababidi offers this succinct directive: “Think twice before buying your next server. Cloud computing is the way forward.”

Backed by Accel Partners and Index Ventures, Playfish is truly a global company with offices in London, San Francisco, Beijing and Norway. Start playing games with Playfish at http://www.playfish.com/?page=games .