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 completed its $218 million acquisition of Neustar’s domain name registry business in the year 2018, marking a big entry into the wholesale part of the domain business.
Neustar registry was hosted in Greenplum Data warehouse server and was processing almost two TBs of data every day. The existing database had performance issues and the cost of ownership was too high. Hence, GoDaddy needed a new database solution, which is scalable, easier to maintain and is able to process the huge amount of data.
Considering how critical and busy this data warehouse is, migrating the data warehouse to a new environment seamlessly without any downtime was a challenge for the GoDadddy team.
Why Amazon Web Services
After evaluating a number of solutions, including other cloud service providers, VirtueTech suggested Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of AWS’ highly scalable, fully managed and cost-effective storage and compute services, as well as its ability to accommodate open-source software and hybrid architecture.
Amazon Redshift delivers fast query performance on gigabytes to petabytes of data, and from a few users to thousands. The ability to connect directly from Tableau to a Redshift cluster means letting anyone easily access your cloud data warehouse and quickly perform visual analysis via Tableau's intuitive drag and drop interface.
Running Critical Applications on AWS
While there were plenty of ways to migrate the workloads to cloud, the cheapest and easiest method was be the lift-and-shift migration. It enabled GoDaddy to enjoy the full benefits of AWS, such as enhanced speed and lower cost of operation
GoDaddy is using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store the cloud-based portion of its data lake, AWS Redshift to handle data warehouse operations and Apache Airflow to programmatically author and schedule their workflows and monitor them via the built-in Airflow user interface. End user is notified of failure via slack with the help of AWS managed airflow. Tableau is connected to the AWS Redshift tables through Redshift connector, which is used for report visualization.
The Benefits
By replacing its existing on-premises database with the Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse, GoDaddy now has a scalable, powerful data solution that is easier to maintain than its previous solution.
Using the AWS Redshift data warehouse has dramatically reduced the time required to obtain registry analysis reports. Analysis performance has also improved since shifting to Amazon Redshift, with faster response and better usability for heavy users.
The AWS cloud has also met GoDaddy’s requirement to maintain operating costs at the same level as with the Greenplum data center.
