Modern development is difficult. The range of technology and our capabilities in the development sphere have ballooned over the last decade or so, while the roles we ask any singular developer to tackle have grown at an equally aggressive pace. Gone are the days of dedicated Java engineers or QA or Linux operators. Instead, modern development requires a broad skillset of DevSecFinOps and more, made broader when company processes get added, and as GoDaddy has grown — so have those processes.
These difficulties eat into the productivity of our engineers and the pace of our development. Despite this, in the last few years, we've reversed this trend and improved our engineers' productivity by leveling up our developer experience. This has meant creating interfaces that help guide more smoothly through company processes, developing tools that eliminate the need for deeper knowledge, writing documentation that's easier to find and consume, and in general — to reduce complexity wherever possible.
The state of developer experience at GoDaddy
GoDaddy has largely kept up with major trends in modern development. We've adopted the public cloud, modern languages like Go and frameworks like React, infrastructure through configuration, GitOps, and a myriad of other modern tenants. Experiences to enable use of these things were initially created in typical Agile fashion as MVPs. These systems weren't initially integrated with each other and business processes were introduced in the most purely functional ways possible — often relying on tickets, PowerPoint files (yes PowerPoint), and spreadsheets to track completion.
Over the last few years, we've iterated on all these systems. Processes such as onboarding to our internal standards and metrics program (SPAQ) or starting a new project have been streamlined. Systems like our internal compute provisioning platform (Katana) have been built to enable anyone to create and maintain the infrastructure for applications, we've cut red-tape wherever possible, limiting required artifacts and in general better aligned our processes with the way engineers work and developers build.
That said, we're not done yet. While some of these systems have been modernized — not everything has. For example, large parts of our previous developer portal (the Cloud-UI) have been moved over to PCP (our new developer portal), but not everything has been moved yet. The old Cloud-UI site still homes a few commonly used tools that still adhere to old models of ownership that are harder to manage. This sophomoric state is largely what defines our developer experience right now here at GoDaddy. We can see the goal and we know how to get there — we must keep moving and improving.
From tickets to self-service: Our three-phase evolution
To understand our progress, it's important to recognize our journey through three distinct phases of developer tooling. We started out with ticket-based systems that, while functional, created significant delays in development cycles. Engineers would submit tickets and wait, often with little visibility into status or ownership. Cost centers remained disconnected from actual development work, and tracking project progress meant wrestling with multiple spreadsheets and presentation files.
Our next evolution brought our first custom development portal (Cloud-UI), representing our first step toward self-service capabilities. This system enabled developers to create VMs, certificates, and other resources without tickets in real time, marking a significant improvement over the ticket-based approach. However, it still lacked uniformity in ownership, access, and product taxonomy.
Today's Developer Experience Portal (PCP) represents our most sophisticated approach yet. It introduces the concept of projects as secure blast zones and ownership bodies complete with budgeting, showback, advanced on-call capability, and simple self-service working team management. Meanwhile applications were introduced to better align with how teams use common tenants and resources and to normalize product taxonomy here at GoDaddy. This unified and normalized approach greatly simplifies the developer experience while also making it faster to build and integrate new tooling.
Key updates delivered this year
While this last evolution of our developer experience has been in motion since our move to the public cloud, we've made some recent strategic and significant strides in enhancing our internal tools and processes, resulting in several notable updates that have positively impacted our developer experience and productivity.
Streamlined project and contact flow has made managing our working teams easier
Teams can now create new on-call groups for projects right in the PCP interface and let PCP manage their email distribution lists for them. They no longer have to navigate between the project system — nor do they have to wait days or weeks for tickets to be resolved, for on-call groups to be created, or email distribution lists to be enabled. Slack webhooks are nearly a thing of the past with simple channel IDs taking their place. This automation has eliminated days of setup time and prevents the common issue of outdated contact information.
Teams can now focus on development instead of administrative overhead, with real-time updates ensuring everyone stays connected to the right resources and people.
Templates have made starting new applications easier and faster
Application templates have transformed how teams initiate new applications at GoDaddy. Engineers can now begin with production-ready code structures that incorporate our best practices and security requirements. These templates provide more than just starter code — they include pre-configured CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure definitions, and monitoring setups.
When a developer creates a new application, they can select from various templates that match their needs, whether building a React frontend, Go microservice, or other application types. The system automatically customizes the template with project-specific values, creating a complete GitHub repository that's ready for immediate deployment.
Applications have brought together SPAQ, business services, and simplified onboarding and reviews
The applications concept represents a significant shift in how we manage service creation and maintenance. By unifying SPAQ, business services, and production certification processes, we've created a single path for application lifecycle management. Engineers no longer need to navigate multiple systems or track various approval processes separately. Privacy Impact Assessments, SPAQ onboarding, readiness reviews, and business service registration now flow through a singular coherent system with contextual guidance.
This integration has reduced onboarding time while ensuring compliance requirements are met consistently across all new applications.
CI/CD runner pools have made GitOps the fast and secure way to handle CI/CD
Our CI/CD infrastructure has evolved from a complex, manually-managed system to an automated, self-service platform. The introduction of runner pools has solved both our security and scale requirements. Teams can now create and manage their own runner pools through a simple interface, with compute resources automatically provisioned in their project's AWS account.
This solution has proven remarkably successful — in twelve months, we've grown from zero to 550 runner pools, supporting thousands of repositories. The system handles automatic scaling, maintenance, and security updates, eliminating weeks of setup and maintenance work previously required for CI/CD infrastructure.
Katana has made obtaining compute a breeze
While we continue to work on rolling out improvement in the "infrastructure through configuration/code" world by uplifting the company to use AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and away from AWS Service Catalog, those upgrades (while critical) don't create the kind of paradigm shifts or higher order tooling that we need to make our developers more efficient. Katana does.
Katana is a self-service computing platform that can be used to create managed compute to run containers on in any project. It requires no understanding of Sceptre or CDK or complex configuration language. Instead, it has an easy-to-use UI that can generate AWS Fargate ECS clusters that can scale up and down and run Docker images of an application with a few button clicks. Teams that use Katana no longer need to rotate or patch compute or obtain the deep operations knowledge it used to take to build and maintain computing platform in the public cloud. Katana also makes it easier to deploy with simple workflow actions and to view cluster performance with integrated dashboards.
Previously it could take a week or more for a team to write and configure the code to generate an ECS Fargate cluster reliably for an application. This year, that can be done in less than five minutes.
Skilling up with the Tooling Bootcamp
With over 2,000 developers spread across the world in different departments and teams, ensuring everyone knows about (and can effectively use) our growing toolset presents a unique challenge. Our Tooling Bootcamp addresses this need by providing hands-on training for our mostly custom, in-house built tools.
The bootcamp focuses on practical application rather than theory. Participants work directly with tools under the guidance of subject matter experts, solving real-world problems they'll encounter in their daily work. This approach ensures engineers not only understand how to use the tools but also how to apply them effectively in their projects.
The results speak for themselves. In our post-session survey, over 93% of participants reported that the hands-on exercises and practical examples helped them understand and apply the tools effectively. Even more telling, in our 30-day follow-up survey, 100% of participants confirmed they had applied their learnings in their daily work.
By combining tool development with comprehensive training, we're ensuring that our investments in developer experience reach their full potential. The Tooling Bootcamp serves as a bridge between creating better tools and empowering engineers to use them effectively.
So, what's next?
The evolution of our developer tools has been significant, but we're not finished. Our vision for the next phase focuses on three key areas: consolidation, automation, and intelligence.
The immediate priority is completing the migration of all developer tools into our unified platform. Services still residing in our legacy development portal, including DNS management and certificate interfaces, need to transition to the project ownership model and be managed through our new developer experience portal. This isn't just about moving features — it's about reimagining these services with the same user-centric design that has made our recent tools successful. Similarly, our Technical Document Library that went live this year as part of our effort to level up our engineering documentation will continue to grow and become the single source of truth documenting our developer platform, options, and tools, replacing numerous stand-alone websites, scattered Confluence articles, and outdated wikis.
Looking toward 2026 and beyond, we're exploring how artificial intelligence can further enhance developer productivity. Imagine AI-powered assistants that can help debug deployment issues, suggest optimizations for infrastructure configurations, or automatically generate and update documentation. The groundwork we've laid with unified systems and structured data makes these possibilities achievable.
Our goal remains consistent: make developers as productive as possible by providing efficient, modern tools that reduce complexity without sacrificing capability. Every improvement we make to our developer experience directly impacts our ability to deliver value to GoDaddy's customers. As we continue this journey, we're committed to maintaining the momentum we've built while ensuring our tools evolve alongside the changing landscape of software development.
If you want to be part of an awesome team that works to solve problems and build solutions for millions of small businesses, check out our current open roles.
