This week GoDaddy, the domain registrar, announced a new public cloud computing service that offers virtual servers to developers that can be spun up within minutes and scaled up and down as needed.
With the news, GoDaddy has jumped into the cloud computing market. And it raises the question: Why don’t more companies that have a substantial internal infrastructure offer it as a service to customers?
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The short answer is because it’s hard.
For GoDaddy, the transition to selling cloud as a service is a natural extension of the company’s services. GoDaddy offers domain name services and website hosting, so providing an application development and virtual server environment is a logical progression of its offerings. Still, it took investment to develop the infrastructure platform into one the company could sell as a service to customers. “Creating a product is a complex effort,” says GoDaddy’s GM and SVP of Hosting Jeff King. GoDaddy based the service on OpenStack, the open source cloud software that can be used to build public or private clouds. But OpenStack isn’t a cloud in a box that can be spun up and sold as a service. GoDaddy had to incorporate a billing feature, which wasn’t included in OpenStack, for example.
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GoDaddy’s now offering a cloud – why don’t more companies do that?
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