Cloud-bound rebound: GoDaddy to migrate majority of infrastructure to AWS

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. GoDaddy’s attempt at an Amazon-like cloud server product in 2016 lasted just about a year before it was killed, but today the web hosting giant announces a deal with AWS.

In July of 2017, GoDaddy’s short-lived cloud service was officially dead.

At the time, GoDaddy senior vice president of hosting Raghu Murthi said in a statement, “After serious consideration, we have decided to end-of-life our cloud servers’ product. GoDaddy Cloud Servers provided numerous learnings for us that we’ve already been applying to other products and services.”

Today, GoDaddy just got a new brother in Amazon Web Services, announcing a multi-year transition to move most of its infrastructure to the AWS cloud hosting service.

The new deal announced today sees the “vast majority” of GoDaddy’s infrastructure being moved to AWS, but as TechCrunch pointed out today, the new deal does not include domain management for GoDaddy’s 75 million or so domains.

“GoDaddy is not migrating the domains it manages to AWS,” Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications told TechCrunch. “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy,” he added.

On the surface the new deal benefits both parties mutually. Amazon will now be able to incorporate some of GoDaddy’s domain technology and website building products into the AWS experience to provide its customers with an array of tools for quickly finding domain names and for building online presence.

“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,” said GoDaddy CTO Charles Beadnall in a statement.

The deal sees GoDaddy gaining access to Amazon’s machine learning, analytics, databases, and container services.

“Our industry-leading services will enable GoDaddy to leverage emerging technologies like machine learning, quickly test ideas, and deliver new tools and solutions to their customers with greater frequency,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS.

Another mutual benefit of the deal is that GoDaddy has been an active adopter of containerized applications, and will now leverage AWS’s Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). This fully managed service will allow GoDaddy to run its many Kubernetes workloads on AWS without change, since Amazon EKS is fully compatible with any standard Kubernetes environment.

AWS will enable GoDaddy to accelerate the delivery of its products and services, and easily deploy them globally in minutes, to its customers worldwide.

The Global Web Hosting Services Market is expected to grow approximately at $154 billion by 2022, at approximately 16% of CAGR between 2016 and 2022, according to a report by Market Research Future.

Amazon Web Services has been very busy as of late in the cloud competition sphere, and is the most likely frontrunner to receive the Pentagon’s cloud procurement dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud — an initiative to bring the Department of Defense’s technology out of the Dark Ages and into the 21st century.