Google Set For Massive Cloud Expansion With 12 New Data Centres

Google has started work on a massive expansion of its data centre operations worldwide, announcing more than 10 new Google Cloud Platform regions in a bid to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The first two new regions are set for Oregon in the United States and Tokyo in Japan, and are expected to be up and running by the end of 2016. The rest will follow in 2017.

Closer to customers

“We’re opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness,” said Varun Sakalkar, Google Cloud’s product manager.

“With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform, and get the benefits of Google-level scale and industry leading price/performance.”

All three of the major public cloud providers – AWS, Google, and Microsoft – have been in engaged in a bitter price war in recent years, attempting to undercut each other in order to attract customers.

But under new cloud leadership from ex-VMware trouper Diane Greene, Google has made moves this year to boost its cloud infrastructure strategy. Earlier this week it was reported that Google may be eyeing up a number of cloud companies for acquisition, endeavouring to diversify its software and infrastructure offerings to match those of Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Interestingly, AWS has 12 regions globally, the same number Google today announced it was heading for. IBM will soon have 15 major data centres around the world.

Today, Google has four cloud regions, but with that sphere of influence set to quadruple into new markets across the globe, international customers are about to have a much tougher choice when it comes to choosing a public cloud provider.

John Dinsdale, data centre analyst at Synergy Research Group, told TechWeekEurope that Google “lags far behind” AWS and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market, in part due to Google having a data centre network that just wasn’t extensive enough.

“Google is now on a drive to help fix that – in addition to increasing its corporate focus on the cloud market. This was long overdue,” he said.

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