Improving Company Agility and Scale Using AWS Cloud Operations with GoDaddy

GoDaddy’s mission is to provide everyday entrepreneurs with the tools they need to be successful. With more than 21 million customers and 84 million domain names, GoDaddy has scaled to more than 2,000 AWS accounts, with 500 projects active in AWS and several thousand engineers using AWS services. Because of its large size, the company knew it had to standardize its use of AWS services and security principles. Additionally, an important part of GoDaddy’s business strategy involves acquiring companies that complement it and add value. “The whole idea is returning value to our customers,” says Jared Beauchamp, director of software development at GoDaddy. “We look across our portfolio to find what services our customers can benefit from, and we evaluate the specific use case on whether it is more beneficial to buy, build, or invest into open source solutions.” To bring this value more quickly to its customers, GoDaddy wanted to speed up the onboarding process for its acquisitions.

At the end of 2021, GoDaddy began an initiative called the Mergers and Acquisitions Integration Team (MAIT) to onboard new acquisitions more quickly. To create this team, GoDaddy worked alongside AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can help companies realize their desired business outcomes when using AWS. After building a set of platform tools to increase the security and architecture capabilities of acquisition AWS accounts, the MAIT team finished the uplift of its first acquisition in September 2022. The team onboarded the new company in 60 days, compared with what would have taken up to 270 days before the MAIT effort.
 

After migrating to AWS, GoDaddy created a developer experience portal to provide a centralized area for developers to access and launch AWS services. The portal offers developers a gateway to onboard to AWS, where they have additional access to default architectures and CloudFormation templates that already have best practices for security, networking, and even budgeting built in. To build this standardized experience, GoDaddy used AWS Service Catalog, a service for centrally managing deployed IT services, applications, resources, and metadata to achieve consistent governance of infrastructure-as-code templates. “Using AWS Service Catalog, we improved our architectural rigor by standardizing and building best practices into the way that all our hundreds of teams deploy AWS services,” says Ketan Patel, senior director of cloud platforms at GoDaddy.

The developer experience portal not only improves standardization but also frees GoDaddy engineers to do what they were hired to do. “The portal uncuffs our developers and gives them the freedom to experiment,” says Beauchamp. “We give them the automation and flexibility they need to launch services.” Around 500 unique developers use the portal every week, and since the launch of the portal, the time required for a team to drive toward production readiness has been reduced by 85 percent, and the speed at which experimentation in AWS can occur has increased by 40 percent. GoDaddy also adds automation and observability to its workflows using Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service, which frees developers to focus on high-priority work. Especially relevant for a large company like GoDaddy, it uses Amazon CloudWatch data to search for opportunities for cost reductions based on how resources are used. By using out-of-the-box monitors from Amazon CloudWatch, GoDaddy can track its infrastructure usage with metrics that have resulted in approximately 12 percent savings on simple workloads, with opportunities for additional enhanced savings across more complex workloads. “Amazon CloudWatch takes care of everything—your metrics, your compute, your logging. What we do now just wasn’t possible before,” says Beauchamp.

To improve monitoring, GoDaddy uses AWS Config, a service for users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of their resources. Using AWS Config, GoDaddy collects data from across most of the infrastructure that engineering teams from across the company have deployed in AWS and migrates this data into its global tech registry so that the company can monitor and manage its AWS accounts. The registry correlates the data it receives to any service event and identifies where the event is happening, what teams are impacted, and how to notify them. AWS Config replaces previous processes in which outages were reported manually, which could take up to an hour for the correct team to be contacted. “The automation we have using AWS Config is faster in recognizing service events and notifying our teams than if we relied on human intervention,” says Patel. With an immediate assessment of an outage’s location and effects, GoDaddy can proactively address issues, potentially improving system reliability and uptime.

The governance and standardization features of AWS CloudFormation, an infrastructure-as-code service, drive GoDaddy’s initiative to have everything in code when deploying on AWS. All information that is added to AWS Service Catalog is supported by an AWS CloudFormation template. Development teams launch their infrastructure through this template in AWS Service Catalog. With this process, GoDaddy can control its environment because teams across the organization can deploy these templates to create a standardized infrastructure. The process also provides teams with less engineering or AWS experience with the ability to quickly ramp up the use of AWS services.

Going forward, GoDaddy hopes to create an experimental mindset that drives innovation by developing a solutions repository that its teams can use to quickly create an environment for a specific task. The repository would give teams the freedom to create a framework, use the benefits of AWS services within that new environment, and then take that environment down just as quickly using an automated process.

GoDaddy has used AWS Cloud Operations to successfully improve the management, governance, and observability of company operations. “Now that we have standardized many things our teams do in AWS, we are migrating our teams even more quickly into the cloud,” says Patel. “In the future, we want to enrich our cloud operation’s ability at scale to the next level.”