Developers can now choose to run applications and store data in Australia using the new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Sydney. This is the first GCP region in Australia and the fourth in Asia Pacific, joining Taiwan, Tokyo and the recently launched Singapore. Data Sovereignty policies in some Australain business and some Government departments, require the process and storage of data to stay in the country, which now opens the doors for GCP to be used in those applications.
Google says customers in Australia will see significant reductions in latency when they run their applications from Sydney. Performance testing shows a reduction in round-trip time (RTT) latency by 80% to 95% when serving customers, compared to using regions in Singapore or Taiwan.
The Sydney GCP region is launching with three zones and several GCP services, and App Engine and Datastore will be available shortly. With the addition of each new region, developers have more choice on how to run applications closest to their customers. Where businesses need to scale globally, Google’s networking backbone transforms compute and storage infrastructure into a global-scale computer, giving developers around the world access to the same cloud infrastructure that Google engineers use every day.
This list of Australian customers already using Google’s Cloud Platform is impressive. They include, Woolworths, Halfbrick, Ingogo, News Corp, Fairfax, Service NSW and PwC to name a few. It is worth noting that Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform added support for Australia back in 2014 while Amazon’s EC2 services have been available since November 2012.
PwC Australia, Chief Information Officer, Hilda Clune says,
“The regional expansion of Google Cloud Platform to Australia will help enable PwC’s rapidly growing need to experiment and innovate and will further extend our work with Google Cloud. It not only provides a reliable and resilient platform that can support our firm’s core technology needs, it also makes available to us, GCP’s market leading technologies and capabilities to support the unprecedented demand of our diverse and evolving business.”
Monash University’s, Chief Information Officer, Trevor Woods said,
“Monash University has one of the most ambitious digital transformation agendas in tertiary education. We’re executing our strategy at pace and needed a platform which would give us the scale, flexibility and functionality to respond rapidly to our development and processing needs. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and in particular App Engine have been a great combination for us and we’re very excited at the results we’re getting. Having Google Cloud Platform hosted now in Australia is a big bonus.”
This isn’t the end of the story for Asia-Pacific, with another region in Mumbai, already underway, as well as new network infrastructure to tie them all together, including the South-East Asia Japan Cable System(SJC) and Indigo cable fibre optic systems.
For more details on Australia’s first region, please visit our Sydney region page where developers can get access to free resources, whitepapers, an on-demand training video series called ‘Cloud On-Air’ and more. These will help you get started on GCP.
More information below and blog post here.
