If CityVille is served by facebook servers, why would Zynga need to rent Amazon facilities? [closed]

Question

Zynga is Amazon's big customer in public cloud. But, when I play CityVille, the URL is served from facebook's server. It looks confusing to me. Can anyone explain the architecture and share of work among Zynga, facebook and amazon? Thanks.

Answer 1

Only the URL you see is one of Facebook. The page contains a frame which is included from Amazon.

According to Facebooks getting started on apps page:

Apps on Facebook.com are loaded into a Canvas Page. A Canvas Page is quite literally a blank canvas within Facebook on which to run your app. You populate the Canvas Page by providing a Canvas URL that contains the HTML, JavaScript and CSS that make up your app. When a user requests the Canvas Page, we load the Canvas URL within an iframe on that page. This results in your app being displayed within the standard Facebook chrome.

For example, suppose that you have a web app available at http://www.example.com/canvas. This is your Canvas URL. When you setup your app on Facebook, you must specify a Canvas Page name that is appended to https://apps.facebook.com/. In this example, we will use your_app as the Canvas Page name. When the user navigates to https://apps.facebook.com/your_app in their browser, they will see the contents of http://www.example.com/canvas loaded inside of Facebook.com.