GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, is now migrating their majority of their infrastructure and data warehouse to AWS. GoDaddy group decided to go with AWS due to its deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support their rapidly expanding business.
The Challenge
GoDaddy is committed to continuous innovation, technology, and platform improvements to create a great experience for its customers. Real Time Finance (RTF) team of GoDaddy, wanted to streamline their process of generating reports, which used to happen earlier using json files. While the reports did give this company specific things they needed, but it was taking a good amount of time to generate the reports and also was not much analyst friendly. Thus, the company decided to shift to more cloud-native solution for generating reports.
Why Amazon Web Services
AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities, which is why GoDaddy selected them to meet their needs today, and into the future. It also enables GoDaddy to accelerate the delivery of its products and services, and easily deploy them globally in minutes, to its customers worldwide. In addition to that, AWS 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.
Running Critical Applications on AWS
GoDaddy provisions Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) cluster to run Pyspark framework, which has automated the entire RTF process. Column mapping feature of this framework helps the user to map the raw column name from source to new column names in AWS Glue tables. By adding this component to the architecture, company not only preserved their reporting system, but also enabled more user-friendly report generation. This framework is developed in such a way that an incremental data is loaded in the final glue table on a daily basis and thus it gives only the latest records from the system, enabling all the stakeholders from GoDaddy to run their SQL like queries and analyze the same on AWS glue and Amazon Athena. Not only is the process of querying now simpler, but the queries themselves also take much less time to complete, since the queries runs only on delta data, and thus reports takes no time to generate, which earlier used to take lots of time.
GoDaddy RTF System Configuration Diagram
The Benefits
VirtueTech advised GoDaddy to switch to a new AWS-based architecture to generate reports for its RTF team. With an on premise solution, the process used to take a large amount of time to generate reports; however, after migrating to AWS, reports not only takes less time but also saves on costs. Analysts also wanted to query their data from SQL like tool, so it will be easy for them to generate reports. Therefore, as a solution, they used Glue/Athena combination for faster and quicker analysis. There are now significantly more opportunities to make data-driven decisions within the organization.
