GoDaddy Goes All-In on AWS
“ GoDaddy was founded on February 8, 1997 in Baltimore, Maryland by entrepreneur Bob Parsons. Parsons sold his financial software services company Parsons Technology to Intuit for $65 million in 1994. “
He came out of his retirement in 1997 to launch Jomax Technologies which became GoDaddy Group Inc. GoDaddy received a strategic investment from private equity funds, KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
GoDaddy was founded on February 8, 1997 in Baltimore, Maryland by entrepreneur Bob Parsons. Parsons sold his financial software services company Parsons Technology to Intuit for $65 million in 1994. He came out of his retirement in 1997 to launch Jomax Technologies which became GoDaddy Group Inc. GoDaddy received a strategic investment from private equity funds, KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
Growth of GoDaddy
In 2001, soon after Network Solutions was no longer the only place to register a domain, GoDaddy was approximately the same size as competitors Dotster and eNom.
In April 2005, GoDaddy became the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the Internet.
As of 2018, GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host by market share, with over 62 million registered domains.
In March 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that GoDaddy is migrating the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS as part of a multi-year transition.
Services Provided by GoDaddy
GoDaddy has a lot of tools to provide various services to its customers. With GoDaddy Auctions, which is GoDaddy’s own domain marketplace, users can list their domain names for sale or bid on other domain name auctions. GoDaddy also lists expiring domain name auctions from other registrars, so thousands of valuable expiring domain names go up for auction and selling every day on GoDaddy Auctions. These expiring domain names go directly to the new owner’s GoDaddy account before they expire. Another service is GoValue, a kind of domain appraisals tool, shows the average value of any given domain name. It calculates the value with an algorithm that evaluates the extension, keyword, comparable domains sold, and probably some other data. GoDaddy named its blog as GoDaddy Garage.
AWS & GoDaddy
It really is Go Time for GoDaddy . Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now migrating “the majority” of its infrastructure to AWS in a multi-year deal that will also see AWS becoming a partner in selling on some products of GoDaddy’s — namely Managed WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.
The deal — financial terms of which are not being disclosed — is wide-ranging, but it will not include taking on domain management for GoDaddy’s 75 million domains currently under management, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to me.
“GoDaddy is not migrating the domains it manages to AWS,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications. “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy.”
AWS services used by GoDaddy
Amazon EC2
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
- It was used for computing capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
Amazon Elastic container
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. Customers such as Duolingo, Samsung, GE, and Cookpad use ECS to run their most sensitive and mission critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability.
ECS is a great choice to run containers for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your ECS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, ECS is used extensively within Amazon to power services such as Amazon SageMaker, AWS Batch, Amazon Lex, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine, ensuring ECS is tested extensively for security, reliability, and availability.
Additionally, because ECS has been a foundational pillar for key Amazon services, it can natively integrate with other services such as Amazon Route 53, Secrets Manager, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon CloudWatch providing you a familiar experience to deploy and scale your containers. ECS is also able to quickly integrate with other AWS services to bring new capabilities to ECS. For example, ECS allows your applications the flexibility to use a mix of Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate with Spot and On-Demand pricing options. ECS also integrates with AWS App Mesh, which is a service mesh, to bring rich observability, traffic controls and security features to your applications. ECS has grown rapidly since launch and is currently launching 5X more containers every hour than EC2 launches instances.
Benefits of AWS
Serverless
ECS supports Fargate to provide serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.
Performance at scale
ECS powers several key services at Amazon and is built on technology developed from many years of experience running highly scalable services. You can rapidly launch thousands of containers using ECS with no additional complexity.
Secure
ECS launches your containers in your own Amazon VPC, allowing you to use your VPC security groups and network ACLs. No compute resources are shared with other customers. You can also assign granular access permissions for each of your containers using IAM to restrict access to each service and what resources a container can access. This high level of isolation helps you use ECS to build highly secure applications.
Reliable
ECS launches your containers in your own Amazon VPC, allowing you to use your VPC security groups and network ACLs. No compute resources are shared with other customers. You can also assign granular access permissions for each of your containers using IAM to restrict access to each service and what resources a container can access. This high level of isolation helps you use ECS to build highly secure applications.
Optimized for cost
With ECS, you can use Fargate Spot tasks or EC2 Spot instances to realize up to 90% discounts compared to on-demand prices for running stateless and fault tolerant applications. You can use savings plan and realize up to 50% discount for persistent workloads. You can easily run ECS clusters at scale by mixing Spot Instances with On-Demand and Reserved Instances.
“ AWS said that GoDaddy will be using AWS’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, as well as machine learning, analytics, and other database-related and container technology…“