How do you manage configuration files across a wide array of games, played by millions of users and served out of multiple data centers?

Over the years Zynga has found that the right solution to this problem varies for each unique service and product. I’d like to present one of these solutions today: Apache ZooKeeper.

Apache ZooKeeper allows Zynga to update thousands of configuration files in under a second. Game servers at Zynga need to interact with various levels of persistent and volatile storage. To provide increased performance, game nodes talk directly to these storage nodes via IP addresses and domain names stored in a local configuration file.