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Google has officially added two new regions to its Cloud Platform infrastructure business with the opening the Southamerica-East1 and Europe-West3 data centers in Brazil and Germany, respectively.
The internet giant previously revealed plans to launch a bunch of new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions throughout 2017. Following the opening last November of Google’s sixth region, in Tokyo, the company has opened regions in London, Sydney, Singapore, and Northern Virginia. We had also known that São Paulo (Brazil) and Frankfurt (Germany) were coming at some point. Google is planning to open additional European GCP regions in the Netherlands and Finland shortly.
The Frankfurt region is Google’s third in Europe — after London (U.K.) and Brussels (Belgium) — and the company said European companies situated east of Frankfurt should notice speedier app performance due to their proximity to the new region.
“Hosting applications in Europe-West3 can improve latency by up to 50 percent for end users in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and eastern Europe, compared to hosting them in Belgium,” the company said in a blog post.
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Though Google officially announced the Frankfurt GCP region launch today, the São Paulo incarnation seems to have been pushed live in the past week or so with next to no fanfare.
Above: Google: GCP Regions
While Germany and the surrounding area are certainly major markets for Google, the São Paulo GCP region is arguably more notable for the company. Brazil and its neighboring countries are major markets for any technology company, but until now Google’s closest data centers were in the southern part of the U.S., which would likely have meant significant latency for data transfers.
This latest move also brings Google into line with two key rivals in the cloud space. Amazon opened an Amazon Web Services (AWS) region way back in 2011, and Microsoft followed suit three years later. So today’s announcement has been a long time coming and will put Google in a stronger position to claim more customers on a continent with more than 400 million people.
Back in May, Microsoft actually beat both Google and Amazon to the punch by announcing its first data centers in Africa, which are expected to go live next year. Google hasn’t given any indication as to when it may launch a region in Africa.
Google Cloud Platform now claims a total of 12 regions and 36 zones globally.
