Google Cloud Launches in Asia-Pacific Region
Google has made strides by lowering cloud storage prices and rolling out a plethora of new features for its enterprise cloud users. Google is capitalizing on this success by announcing the launch of its first Asia-Pacific cloud infrastructure that is currently available for use. In a release, Google said, “Now, more developers in Asia Pacific can experience the speed and scale of Google’s infrastructure with the expansion of support for Cloud Platform.”
Releasing cloud services to those in the Asia-Pacific region was bound to happen due to the fact that Google reportedly finished building a new datacenter in Taiwan and another in Singapore at the end of 2013. Google invested nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in these datacenters with most of the money going towards to the datacenter in Taiwan. The services offered aren’t anything different than the typical Google cloud suite. Administrators get full access to compute, storage and Cloud SQL nodes.
Since these datacenters are brand new, the underlying technology in the Asia-Pacific datacenters is newer than other datacenters Google has built out. The Asian-Pacific datacenters feature the Intel Ivy Bridge processers whereas other Google datacenters use the older Sandy Bridge processors.
Andromeda is also included in Google’s Asian-Pacific cloud. This software defined networking suite will help administrators as they construct complex networks inside of the cloud. Another key feature of this new cloud service is that Google will be performing what they have dubbed “Transparent maintenance” inside of these new datacenters. This allows Google engineers to work on the cloud’s servers without taking down the any of the resources needed by its clients. While transparent maintenance is available in the US and the new Asia-Pacific datacenters, it is not currently available in Google’s European datacenters.
Cloud providers have been rushing to break into the Asia-Pacific market for quite some time. Azure, AWS and IBM have all launched cloud services in this area and many analysts believe that these public cloud outfits are just a precursor to the robust innovation consumers can expect from region.
