Google Cloud Platform Expands To Asia Pacific With 2 New Compute Engine Zones

The Asia-Pacific market is quickly becoming a battleground for cloud computing vendors. Amazon has always been very active in the region. Microsoft is investing heavily there and made Azure generally available in China last month, for example. Today, Google is joining the fray by launching its first two Compute Engine zones in the Asia-Pacific region.

Developers will now be able to deploy their cloud-based applications in two Compute Engine zones in Asia Pacific (asia-east1-a and asia-east1-b). This mimics Cloud Platform’s structure in the U.S. and Europe. Unlike in those two regions, Google is using Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors in its Taiwan data center instead of the older Sandy Bridge technology.

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The new data centers will use the same recently announced Andromeda network virtualization stack as Google’s other data centers. Users in the two new zones will also get the benefits of Google’s transparent maintenance — which ensures apps will keep running even when Google needs to perform routine maintenance tasks in the data center. This feature still isn’t available in Google’s European zones.

In addition to Compute Engine, developers will also be able to deploy Cloud SQL databases in the region and use Cloud Storage to store their data.

This announcement doesn’t come as a major surprise. Google opened its new data center in Taiwan at the end of last year, after all, and bringing its Cloud Platform services to this facility was always an obvious move. Most of the cloud computing providers I talk to tell me that they are seeing massive demand for their services in this region and Google had to catch up to its competitors sooner or later.