Increasing Developer Velocity Using AWS Cloud Development Kit with GoDaddy

Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, GoDaddy is a trusted partner for millions of everyday entrepreneurs, empowering them to develop their own ventures with the right help and tools. In early 2018, GoDaddy began a strategic journey to use AWS to help its teams build better products at a faster pace. As its developer community grew, GoDaddy wanted to optimize this process. “As more developers made contributions into AWS Service Catalog, we needed more developers to then review and approve those changes to maintain compliance with our code requirements and security standards,” says Damian Silbergleith, principal engineer at GoDaddy. “We wanted to build common pieces of infrastructure and distribute them to our developers while giving them the ability to quickly and efficiently build on top of the patterns that we’ve developed.” 

As part of its digital transformation, GoDaddy has continually searched for ways to improve its speed of innovation on the cloud while maintaining security best practices. At the same time, it wanted all its developers to adopt an infrastructure-as-code approach. While searching for a new solution to provision cloud infrastructure, it found AWS CDK. “We want to let our engineers move at scale faster and more natively so that we can get our products and features deployed on AWS for our customers quicker,” says Ketan Patel, senior director of engineering at GoDaddy. “We started to look at AWS CDK more closely so that we can help our engineers deploy not only their applications more productively but also their infrastructure on AWS. At the same time, we can incorporate guardrails and safety measures alongside AWS CDK that we need along the way.”

GoDaddy engaged in a pilot program by adopting AWS CDK as its primary means to provision cloud infrastructure, with nine development teams participating in the initiative. The company uses AWS CDK on top of AWS CloudFormation, a service that lets developers model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources by treating infrastructure as code. GoDaddy uses AWS CDK to act as a rendering engine before producing an AWS CloudFormation template, making it simple to build robust products. “You can build and tailor beautiful construct libraries to accompany the AWS CDK experience and make your usage of AWS CloudFormation much simpler,” says Silbergleith. 

As part of the pilot program, GoDaddy first transitioned a targeted set of AWS accounts to AWS CDK and plans to deploy the solution more broadly in the future. The teams with access to AWS CDK can quickly provision common pieces of cloud infrastructure and efficiently build powerful solutions on top of it. As a result, these teams can ship innovative features and applications at a much faster pace. As GoDaddy continues to roll out AWS CDK, this improved speed of innovation will deliver significant benefits to the company, especially as it engages in mergers and acquisitions. “The faster that we’re able to complete an acquisition, the faster we’re able to deploy new features and services to our customers,” says Patel. “We can meet our end goal of providing our customers with all the different tools and services that they want to be able to run their businesses and continue to thrive online. The faster we can make our developers move, the faster we can deliver additional value to our customers.” 

In addition to provisioning cloud infrastructure, GoDaddy uses AWS CDK and AWS CloudFormation to comply with standards for code and security. The company uses AWS CloudFormation Hooks to run code before the creation of cloud infrastructure and checks each resource against the rules that it has established. If the company detects any deviations, it can cancel the deployment, and developers can work on updating the application. GoDaddy has also created a custom solution to support governance. “We’ve developed a platform called Stack Safeguard, which we use to process rule sets against AWS CloudFormation templates,” says Silbergleith. “Using this solution, we can approve or deny particular aspects of those templates during deployment, helping maintain our governance standards.”