Google has a global network of 34 regions and 103 availability zones, bringing its Cloud services to customers in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. Recently, the company announced that it would expand its presence to three new cloud regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand - on top of six other regions previously announced coming to Berlin, Dammam, Doha, Mexico, Tel Aviv, and Turin.
According to a Google Cloud blog post by Google Cloud’s Asia-Pacific vice president Karan Bajwa, the rationale behind the expansions is that data from IDC projects that total spending on cloud services in APAC (excluding Japan) will reach $282 billion by 2025. In addition, another research report cited in the post is from a 2021 survey from Information Services Group, which states that cloud services account for more than 84% of APAC’s IT and business services spending in Q3 2021, the most significant percentage of any region.
Bajwa also explains in the blog post that new cloud regions emerge as demand for digital services grows. Cloud adoption is increasing across industries in these markets, particularly in telecommunications, manufacturing, financial services, and retail.
A Google Cloud region is a specific geographic location where customers can deploy cloud resources in the context of cloud computing. At the very least, all Google Cloud regions provide services such as Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, Virtual Private Cloud, Key Management System, Cloud Identity, and Secret Manager. Additional products are typically available within six months of the launch of a new region.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations
Google is currently trailing behind the other public cloud vendors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. According to IT market research Synergy Research Group, AWS leads with 34 percent of the global market share, followed by Microsoft at 21, and then Google at 10 percent. Combined, the three public cloud vendors are also the most significant spenders when it comes to building new data centers. For example, in 2022 only, Google intends to invest $9.5 billion in data centers and U.S. offices.
Simon Merrick, a DevOps/Cloud engineer at Trade Me, welcomes the cloud providers in New Zealand in a tweet:
And there you have it. @GoogleCloud_ANZ joining @awscloud and @Azure in opening datacenters in NZ.
Finally, Google Cloud is expected to have 14 cloud regions across the entire APAC region by the end of the year, compared to AWS' 13 regions, three of which are planned in India, Australia, and New Zealand. Furthermore, Alibaba currently has 21 cloud regions, with no new regions announced this year. In the APAC region, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM are expected to have 9, 17, and 7 cloud regions, respectively.