
Google Cloud Platform sets a course for new horizons - hurrycane
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-Platform-sets-a-course-for-new-horizons.html
======
mikecb
New regions in Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Finland, Frankfurt, London,
Sao Paulo and N. Virgina, with 3 zones per region (2 in Fin and Sing)? That
brings them to 37 (edit: soon 38 with a third zone in Oregon) zones in 14
regions. In addition, they're putting down building footprints in Alabama and
Tennessee, which may become new regions in the future, and adding buildings in
Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, and Belgium, which may become new zones. In
March, they announced 10 new regions in 2017, and the above numbers account
for only 8.

AWS will have 40 zones in 16 regions in the same time period (based on their
public announcements.

Not sure about the AWS backbone though. GCP has access to dedicated fiber from
the US to both the Pacific and South America on the order of 10Tbps, and
that's just the wholly-owned stuff disclosed in public. Amazon is quite hush
hush on their network.

~~~
boulos
Sorry we didn't make this explicit, but we'll be three zones for GCE in Oregon
"soon" (i.e., us-west1-c will be online).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
daveloyall
Speaking of locations... Here's a nitpick... :)

The dot for Council Bluffs on the map in the article[0] is misplaced by
hundreds of miles.

0:
[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mCc_hmccB3k/V-y4E1VHooI/AAAAAAAAD...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mCc_hmccB3k/V-y4E1VHooI/AAAAAAAADIs/Cx3pc4MlBasLG3uB2VBsZ-
gCpqy_ftbvACLcB/s1600/google-cloud-network.png)

~~~
boulos
I know! I looked at it and said "Wow, what the hell? Did someone decide the
dots would be too close?". All I can say is "Sorry, Diagram for conceptual
purposes only".

However, it is one of our first to include the submarine cables! (So it's got
that going for it)

~~~
mikecb
Yeah, the cables were very cool to see.

For others reference, the Iowa DC's are two buildings a third of a mile long
and at least two stories of data halls, with at least one other smaller
footprint that I believe is 4 stories, and plenty of room to grow. The
Oklahoma campus is similarly massive.

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georgewfraser
Buried in the BigQuery "Standard SQL" blog post is support for DELETE and
UPDATE statements. This is HUGE for BigQuery - the biggest problem has always
been that it's an append-only data warehouse.

My company does ETL-as-a-service
([https://fivetran.com/](https://fivetran.com/)) and we've had beta support
for BigQuery for the last few months using a somewhat crazy copy-the-table-
every-time strategy. We're really excited to have DELETE and UPDATE and we'll
be switching over in the next few days.

~~~
eitally
BQ is getting awesome and is a legit option for many many workloads that
wouldn't have made sense for the cloud a year ago. For example, if I was
contemplating a Netezza or Teradata environment for an EDW, I'd slap myself
[hopefully before writing the check].

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samspenc
"We’ve recently joined the ranks of Google’s billion-user products. Google
Cloud Platform now serves over one billion end-users through its customers’
products and services."

That is interesting. I understand that the enterprises running GCP reach a
billion-plus people on GCP, but does that qualify GCP itself as one of
Google's billion-plus products?

~~~
obmelvin
I think so. It's pretty unrealistic for one billion people to use GCP
directly.

------
Ironlink
The managed Kubernetes across multiple clouds sounds very nice! Or am I
reading too much into this? I would love to give GKE some access token to my
AWS and have them manage the whole shebang.

> "In our support of this feature, GKE customers will be able to build
> applications that can easily span multiple clouds"

~~~
thesandlord
This is what cluster federation is for.
[http://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/federation/](http://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/federation/)

------
s3r3nity
<Semi-Related Anecdote> I remember a friend of mine was working at Dropbox as
an intern when they were only a few hundred employees, and we would tell me
stories of these "R&D" brainstorm sessions - unofficial meetings where they
would just spitball crazy ideas on where the industry was going or new product
ideas, and collect them for future hackathons and the like (the best ones I'm
guessing got put into the actual product roadmap.)

My favorite idea he mentioned was this assertion that the industry was moving
towards a "cloud-within-a-cloud", or "a cloud of clouds." We both laughed for
a good few minutes over how silly Silicon Valley terminology could sound
sometimes.

Turns out this mysterious person was ahead of their time...</Semi-Related
Anecdote>

~~~
johansch
> when they were only a few hundred employees

So like 3-4 years ago?

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yannovitch
To the Google Cloud Engineers out here : If I use GKE in your Frankfurt,
London or Belgium DC, will I be subject to the Patriot Act,potentially
allowing US government to look or take over my private data? If that's the
case, I still prefer to go through all the big headaches of setting up
manually Kubernetes on Swiss or French cloud computing offering, or on my own
servers

------
skizm
I still haven't figured out how to run a blog sized web app with Java 8 or
python 3 on a Google product that isn't in experimental mode yet.

Where should I start if that's my goal?

~~~
thesandlord
Both Google Compute Engine and Google Container Engine are Generally Available
(i.e not experimental) and will run Java 8 and Python 3.

App Engine != all of Google Cloud Platform

(I work on Google Cloud)

~~~
skizm
Cool. Thanks. Containers seem overkill, but compute engine seems like it would
work.

FWIW "Compute Engine" makes it seem like some API for machine learning or big
data processing. I would not have guessed it was Google's version of EC2.

~~~
boulos
I don't blame you, sadly because "Search Engine" everything here is called "X
Engine" (including say Maps Engine). If you're familiar with AWS services, we
made a little mapping guide:
[https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/](https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/)
.

~~~
skizm
Engine (to me) also implies a monolithic process where something goes in one
end, work is done, and something is produced. A compute engine computes
things, a search engine searches things, a game engine does game computations,
etc.

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esseti
but do they have anything like rds (postgress) and s3 (dome storage) from
amazon?

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sirchuckalot
Awesome news on the added regions.

One issue I've found with GCP is the Support pricing compared to AWS. Next
step from basic is $150 p/m for support on GCP (2 individuals) compared to
around $29-$39 p/m on AWS (for 1 individual).

Is GCP going to start offering support to 1-man dev teams with side projects?
Stackexchange, communities, docs are only helpful up to a point.

~~~
eitally
Likely. Growing pains mean first priority are large customers, but ... there
is much growing going on, including/especially in proserve & support orgs.

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josteink
This is all marketing blarb and zero substance.

Oh. And G Suite? _Thanks_ for rebranding Google Apps once again, without
adding anything actually new. Now we'll have to update our documentation,
marketing material and what not. Again.

Just great.

~~~
seccess
(I think you commented on the wrong post, you want
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607160))

