GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?
Geographic reach is the significant thing holding GCP back at this point - despite being ahead on the tech. Not having a Singapore presence (or anything closer to India) basically kills it as a serious option for many Indian companies. I personally know of a couple of startups personally who would have loved to use GCP since they actually want to use things like BigQuery, but went with AWS due to this.
They have so far just mentioned they are adding two regions soon - but nothing about where. I fear its just additional options in Europe or something ... 2017 is still too far out for a startup considering options today.
Edit: Oh .... looks like I missed the announcement that the two new regions are Tokyo and Oregon. Looks like India is out of luck for now.
Hmm, our Taiwan region (asia-east1) is too far? We've had a number of customers from India, and thanks to our points-of-presence throughout the world it's not so simple as "AWS is in Singapore, Google is in Taiwan". That said, we hear you, and you can imagine we've done a lot of asking customers (and losing deals!) on the basis of where we are and where we could be.
Yes, Taiwan is too far. I personally know of an adtech startup that is going through contortions because they need to stay below latency limits on specific ad exchanges and those exchanges are located in Singapore. Taiwan is certainly way to far for them.
There are other instances where I think additional ~50ms latency diff to from India to Taiwan matters much less and I am dubious if it is material. But what matters if that the difference exists and people believe it does matter.
We're squeezing by in Taiwan just about, if anything changes networking wise though we're going to have to diversify to more providers.
If you're struggling to respond within 50ms anyway then you're going to have a bad time with the added latency. Thankfully our 95th percentile is around 20ms.
We are however having to go into AWS for Aus/NZ which is a pain.
AWS is coming to Mumbai(IN) in near future. It will make it give much better performance for us so right now investing time in GCE is difficult to justify.
- three in the US (1 in Virginia, one in Oregon, one in Northern California)
- two in Europe (Dublin and Frankfurt)
- four in Asia (Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul)
- one in South America (São Paolo)
and both Montreal and India announced. So by part way through 2017, the "numbers" would be sort of comparable but the real factors are your latency requirements, data sovereignty (hello Germany!) and the features you need (and not all features are available in all regions!).
The German laws on that are interesting, and I don’t think Google’s Cloud can every comply with them – because you may not give any foreign third party access to personally identifiable data, or move it to a country with lower data privacy laws, hosting it in a Google-provided system would be quite problematic.
Although the laws are a pain (including for me, even if you just host an IRC bouncer for a bunch of people they become quite interesting), I wouldn’t trade them away for anything, because they help ensure that all spying that happens can be democratically regulated by those who are spied upon.
