In 2018 Google will launch five new cloud computing regions around the world, adding capacity as it gears up to take on its cloud rivals.
The company announced Tuesday that the new regions — Los Angeles, Montreal, the Netherlands, Finland, and Hong Kong — will arrive at some point this year, with the Netherlands and Hong Kong scheduled to come online in the first quarter. Each new region will have multiple availability zones, which give customers some flexibility and protection when setting up workloads in a given region.
Google also announced plans for three new undersea cables that will connect its data centers around the world. It’s building its own cable to connect Los Angeles and Chile, which Google said made it the first non-telecom company to build an intercontinental cable on its own. It has already built several undersea cables as part of a consortium of companies, and will add two more consortium-driven cables over the next few years connecting Denmark to Ireland and Hong Kong to Guam.
Despite being the longtime third wheel in the cloud computing market, Google’s problem has never been its computing infrastructure; Google invented a lot of the techniques and tactics that modern data centers use to meet customer demand. It has been making a concerted effort over the last year or so to remind current and potential customers that it has the expertise and financial capacity to continue investing in that network.
And to be clear, market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft also have the expertise and financial capacity to build, maintain, and improve world-class computing infrastructure around the globe. Google’s effort is an attempt to set it apart from the legacy enterprise tech vendors like Oracle, IBM, and Cisco, who are desperate for more cloud computing business but face a variety of financial and marketing challenges when trying to keep pace with the investment it takes to keep up with the cloud leaders.
