On March 21, GoDaddy announced the launch of cloud services aimed at bringing the economics and operational agility of the cloud to its millions of small business customers. Integrated with its domain registration and DNS services, GoDaddy cloud services allows customers to provision infrastructure in less than 54 seconds by means of an intuitive user interface. Built on OpenStack cloud technology and powered by KVM virtualization, GoDaddy’s cloud application library integrates with Bitnami to deliver applications such as WordPress, Drupal, the CRM Odoo and eCommerce platforms OpenCart and Magento. GoDaddy’s cloud services are available to customers via the utility-based pricing that represents one key attribute of cloud computing. GoDaddy’s cloud services offering aims to build on its reputation and experience with cloud hosting for small businesses by additionally offering those same clients the ability to provision infrastructure and applications for a broader range of use cases than simple web or content management hosting. GoDaddy’s decision to offer cloud services illustrates its belief that small businesses may not have the confidence to collaborate with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform, and correspondingly points to the market potential of a cloud offering dedicated to SMBs. GoDaddy’s cloud services offering also underscores the continued importance of OpenStack to contemporary IaaS cloud computing in the wake of a series of acquisitions of OpenStack startups by tech behemoths such as Cisco and EMC.
Cloud Computing Today 