Google announces even more cloud regions

Four new regions announced including first in the Middle East

Google is stepping up efforts to attract international customers to its cloud platform, announcing four new cloud regions on top of the four it was already planning to launch this year.

The Alphabet subsidiary, which trails Microsoft and Amazon in the public cloud market, revealed plans to open new regions in Delhi, Doha, Melbourne and Toronto, cities all located in countries with existing data centre regions.

The company previously said regions in Jakarta, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Seoul and Warsaw would open this year. Google’s Salt Lake City data centre opened this week.

For Google, a region consists of three distinct zones. Each of the new regions will launch with a portfolio of key GCP products, and offer lower latency to nearby users.

Google currently operates 22 regions across 16 countries. A cloud region contains multiple data centre or zones to provide redundancy and avoid a single point of failure for cloud resources.

As the upcoming Delhi, Melbourne and Toronto regions are the second within those markets, Google said it can now offer in-country disaster recovery for mission-critical applications.

Google’s Doha region is the company’s first in the Middle East. The company joins cloud rivals AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud and IBM in launching facilities in the region.

AWS has three data centres in Bahrain and the UAE, while Microsoft opened data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi last year.

Oracle also opened its first data centre in Abu Dhabi last year, with another UAE and two further Saudi Arabia facilities planned this year. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud invested in a facility in the UAE in 2016.

Dave Stiver, Senior Product Manager, GeoExpansion at Google Cloud commented:

“Delivering the best experience is our priority, and as our customer base expands around the world, we’ll also look to add other regions in new markets across the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas to provide all of our users with reliable performance, security and leading sustainability.”