Google Reveals Four New Cloud Regions In The Works
The hyperscale provider jostling for international market share with Amazon and Microsoft will open new data centers, each with three distinct zones, in India, Qatar, Australia and Canada.
Google Cloud’s global expansion isn’t slowing down, with the hyper-scale provider that’s third in public cloud market share announcing new regions Wednesday to better serve international markets.
As it brings new data centers online this year in the U.S., Asia and Eastern Europe, Google Cloud said new ones are now in the works for Delhi, India; Doha, Qatar; Melbourne, Australia; and Toronto, Canada.
Google Cloud Platform currently operates in 22 distinct regions across 16 countries. The new facilities in Delhi, Melbourne and Toronto are the second regions in those cities’ countries.
[Related: Google Cloud Next Conference Goes Virtual Over Coronavirus Fears]
The four regions Google just announced, like all its others, will consist of three distinct zones for redundancy to limit the possibility of service disruptions.
“Customers for public cloud need regions in their legal jurisdiction, connected to local sources of data, and close enough to their customers to make apps snappy,” said Miles Ward, CTO of Google partner SADA Systems, who was formerly Google’s director and global lead for solutions.
By reducing latency to many potential customers, Google’s latest plans for expansion will continue to make GCP a more-attractive environment for multi-national enterprises.
“One hundred milliseconds may not sound like a lot, but it's enough to push costs up, grind usability down, and make buyers prefer something closer to home,” Ward said. “It's critical that Google Cloud continue to invest in their customer's success by building out regions all over the world. Kudos to them for their rapid growth.”
The Toronto build-out is especially empowering to SADA’s business, as the Los Angeles-based Google Cloud reseller has been ramping operations in that city and throughout Canada.
For cloud providers, building infrastructure in foreign markets enables in-country disaster recovery, which is often a critical to enterprises running mission-critical applications, especially in regulated markets.
In February, Google launched its first South Korean data center in Seoul, and another in Salt Lake City, which enables Google customers to distribute their application workloads across three regions in the western United States, including Los Angeles and Oregon.
Osaka, Japan, and Jakarta, Indonesia regions are expected to come online in the first half of the year.
In September of last year, Google committed to invest $3.3 billion to expand its data centers in Europe over two years.
That plan brought the company’s total investment in Europe’s internet infrastructure to $16.5 billion since 2007, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time, during a press conference with Finland Prime Minister Antti Rinne.
The number of Google Cloud regions now in existence is a far cry from what Google offered in 2016, when the company excited its base of cloud partners with an ambitious data center expansion plan.
That plan started a build-out that took Google Cloud from a mere four regions at the time, to the 22 now in operation that deliver high-availability to a global base of customers.