Building an open cloud with OpenStack

Industry NewsCategory
2 min read
Christopher Carfi

There's a lot of talk about the importance of "scale" when a business is growing. Yet scale is a double-edged sword. On one hand, scaling up opens the doors to opportunities to serve a massive customer base and make a real difference to a huge number of customers. On the other hand, doing things at scale means that things that used to be minor annoyances become significant challenges when writ large.

GoDaddy handles more than 57 million domains, and supports approximately 8.5 million websites across more than 37,000 servers around the world. That's scale. To fulfil our mission of enabling and supporting our small business customers, we need to provide them the online tools they need to be successful — including shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. On top of that, we offer domain registration, email, Web presence development and e-commerce solutions.

Scaling the cloud with OpenStack

“The community makes it easier for us to use OpenStack to build out the large-scale distributed system that our customers need.” ~ Ryan Burkhardt

In order to be flexible and still scale to support this massive enterprise, GoDaddy has wholeheartedly embraced the OpenStack® platform. OpenStack is a cloud operating system that manages compute, storage, and networking resources.

“Small businesses know that if they want to be found, they need a great Web presence,” said Ryan Burkhardt, vice president of engineering for GoDaddy’s cloud platform. “We pride ourselves on being able to provide the best products possible for the best possible price so our small business customers can be successful. OpenStack plays right into that wheelhouse."

In a recent interview on OpenStack Superuser, Burkhardt dives into the details of GoDaddy's commitment to the OpenStack community and its approach to delivering solutions using OpenStack.

To read the full interview, check out GoDaddy builds their open cloud with OpenStack.