GoDaddy Plans Wholesale AWS Cloud Migration

As its target customer base of small businesses continue to shy away from managing servers and hardware, GoDaddy is following suit; Shopify is the latest company to jump aboard Google Cloud services; Salesforce has launched Integration Cloud.

Nicole Henderson, Contributor

March 30, 2018

4 Min Read
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DAYTONA BEACH, FL - FEBRUARY 18: Danica Patrick, driver of the #7 GoDaddy Chevrolet, walks from the infield care center after being involved in an on-track incident the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series 60th Annual Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 18, 2018 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)

As its target customer base of small businesses continue to shy away from managing servers and hardware, GoDaddy is following suit by signing a deal with Amazon Web Services to run most its infrastructure in the public cloud. The AWS cloud migration will take multiple years, and include Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3 Instances.

For GoDaddy -- one of the world’s largest small business web hosting provider with more than 17 million customers -- the deal is significant. In fact, it may be hard to find a partnership that more clearly reflects the changes brought on by the public cloud and a company's decision to focus on its core business (i.e. domains) and outsource the rest.

“This was in many ways a sign of the times,” Philbert Shih, managing director of Structure Research said. “This is where a lot of the sector is going to go.”

“What’s different with this is a lot of the activity around service providers working with AWS has been reselling and managing on top,” he said, noting that some smaller WordPress hosting providers do use AWS infrastructure. But none with the same footprint as GoDaddy, which has 14 data centers worldwide.

GoDaddy is the global market leader in domain name registration. However, it's not planning an AWS cloud migration for its domain management business. As of December 2017, it had more than 75 million domains under management, with 92 percent of its customers’ owning domains they purchased from GoDaddy. Its domains business generates more than half of its revenue, per its most recent earnings.

In recent years, GoDaddy began to focus more on services that target small businesses specifically, like managed WordPress, online marketing, and web security. While it still sells VPS hosting and dedicated servers, it wraps those services under “Hosting and Presence”, which include its website builder tool GoCentral – a service that GoDaddy said has seen “continued strong adoption, increasing conversion from free to paid, and generating positive customer feedback and rising net promoter scores.” Its Hosting and Presence division hit $228.8 million in revenue in Q4, up 29.5 percent year over year.

“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” Charles Beadnall, Chief Technology Officer at GoDaddy said in a statement. “AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities which is why we selected them to meet our needs today and into the future. By operating on AWS, we’ll be able to innovate at the speed and scale we need to deliver powerful new tools that will help our customers run their own ventures and be successful online.”

Shih said that as GoDaddy has been on a rapid international expansion path, the migration to AWS makes even more sense.

“With the AWS partnership GoDaddy can literally spin up a presence in a market overnight, they can scale it as they grow, and the risk factor is lower,” he said.

So far there are no details about how many data centers GoDaddy will inevitably shut down as part of its AWS cloud migration plan, but since it’s a public company, we should soon find out.


Google Cloud Signs Shopify

Shopify is the latest company to jump aboard Google Cloud services, saying it will move all its shopping traffic to Google Cloud platform. Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify has about 600,000 customers, the Financial Post reports.

The customer win comes as Google recently signed a deal with Spotify where the music streaming service will move all its data storage and computing to GCP.

Ecommerce merchants and the vendors that serve them may opt for an AWS alternative since its Amazon.com division is gutting many retailers.


Salesforce Moves on Mulesoft Buy with Integration Cloud

A week after announcing its $6.5 billion acquisition of Mulesoft, Salesforce has launched Integration Cloud, which includes a set of services and tools for customers to surface data and deliver connected customer experiences. According to a press release by Salesforce, Integration Cloud will have three layers:

  • Integration Platform: Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MuleSoft, one of the leading platforms for building application networks that connect enterprise apps, data and devices, across any cloud and on-premises. MuleSoft will continue to build toward its vision of the application network with its Anypoint Platform, which is already being used by the world's most innovative brands, and will also power the new Integration Cloud. All references to MuleSoft and its products are subject to the closing of the transaction.

  • Integration Builder: Admins can build a single view of the customer across all of their Salesforce deployments as well as their entire network of business systems — all with clicks, not code. In addition, admins can manage all of these connections through a unified admin console.

  • Integration Experiences: By automatically bringing together Salesforce customer data in entirely new ways, admins can create truly seamless and personalized end-to-end customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. For example, an admin can easily use the Lightning App Builder to bring in commerce order history data into the Lightning service console, enabling service reps to transform service interactions into cross-sell and upsell opportunities — without ever leaving their console.

About the Author

Nicole Henderson

Contributor, IT Pro Today

Nicole Henderson covers daily cloud news and features online for ITPro Today. Prior to ITPro Today, she was editor at Talkin' Cloud (now Channel Futures) and the WHIR. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto.

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