Internet domain name registrar GoDaddy has signed a multiyear deal with Amazon Web Services to migrate most of its computing infrastructure on to AWS, the two companies plan to announce Wednesday.
It will take a while for GoDaddy to migrate its computing infrastructure onto the servers of the public cloud market leader, but it is particularly interested in the managed Kubernetes service introduced by AWS at re:Invent 2017 last November, according to a press release authored by AWS.
GoDaddy, which has tried really hard to shed the brotastic public image it embraced for so many years, flirted with the idea of offering its own cloud services in the past, at one point allowing customers to build and test applications on its own infrastructure before shuttering that product last year. That’s after it embarked on a huge IT modernization project in 2015, hoping to elevate its aging infrastructure on its own without resorting to cloud services.
Just a year ago, former GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving told GeekWire that the company was considering hooking up with cloud providers as it added workloads in new geographies outside the U.S. while maintaining its own infrastructure in the U.S., but it would appear something has changed under new CEO Scott Wagner.
AWS noted that it plans to work with GoDaddy to offer domain-related services as part of the deal, which might have provided some additional incentive for the two companies to get together. The deal comes in just under the wire before the end of the first quarter, and we’ll see if it moved the needle for AWS at all when it reports earnings in a few weeks.
