
GCP arrives in India with launch of Mumbai region - QUFB
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/10/GCP-arrives-in-India-with-launch-of-Mumbai-region.html
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shubhamjain
> With the opening of this Mumbai region, Indian customers are now able to buy
> these services directly in Indian rupees.

Somewhat related: I was forced to switch to GCP for hosting my static website
because of lack of payment options. AWS doesn't allow you to prepay. The only
way to settle your dues is using a credit card. My international debit card
usually works everywhere but it didn't in case of AWS. I never felt the need
to get a credit card. I had to waste many hours in moving to GCP because there
wasn't a way I could use to pay.

It's funny how I have failed often to buy something online because payment
options are not international friendly. Latest in this case was New Yorker
subscription. Every address combination I tried said the same thing: "Address
is invalid", even though I had ticked the option for International
subscription. Support was hopeless and in the end, I had to go without it.
It's like I am saying, "Shut up and take my money" and people at the other end
are tone-deaf to it.

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tehlike
I am always curious about why people don't use credit cards more. Would you
please explain your reason?

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Tijdreiziger
1\. It doesn't make any sense to allow yourself to risk spending more than you
have

2\. They're more prone to abuse: if somebody gets hold of the numbers on your
card (whether by a leak or hack or by old-fashioned pickpocketing), no further
PIN, password or 2FA token is required

3\. The only use for them is online spending outside Europe, and even then the
number of websites that require them is rapidly shrinking (PayPal can work
with bank accounts, and Stripe now supports SEPA direct debit and local
payment methods such as SOFORT (Germany), iDEAL (Netherlands) and Bancontact
(Belgium))

4\. They cost money (see point 3, people don't like paying for things they
don't use)

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greenleafjacob
1\. This just requires control.

2\. In the US at least, fraud isn’t the responsibility of the card owner

3\. That’s true

4\. There are plenty of cards with no annual fee and net negative cost through
rewards

~~~
tehlike
+1.

The cost of the risk of fraud is bundled into the ~2-3% transaction fee.

1\. As for 1, it's self control. 3\. The only use is not for online shopping,
it's for every day use. Cash can get stolen, credit card can, but you can then
cancel it. 4\. Plenty of cards are free.

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Tijdreiziger
1\. Yes, but it's easier to just not have one.

3\. For every day use, there is your bank card which comes for free with your
bank account. (A growing number of people don't use cash daily, and there are
even people who have ditched cash altogether and gone card-only.)

4\. I have not run into any free CCs offered in my country (Netherlands). If
you have, please point me to them.

As for fraud, it's not only about the risk, but also about the hassle. I have
heard of people who had their credit card suddenly cancelled because of
fraudulent transactions, and the banks will only send a replacement to your
home address, even when you are travelling! The risk that this happens with a
bank card is much lower, as entering your PIN proves that you authorize the
transaction.

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tehlike
Definitely not the experience in united states. I was offered to cancel my
card for a similar situation, and they offered to send it to my country.

I guess a bunch of countries are behind USA in credit card offerings. I am
from Turkey, and situation in Turkey is very similar to united states - credit
cards are very very common.

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amitutk
The biggest tech hub in India is in Bangalore, but both AWS and GCP chose
Mumbai. Because of proximity to international data cables?

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rb808
The datacenters should be where the users are, not where the developers are.

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dgemm
By locating them at major internet exchange points they are doing exactly
that, being closer to more users.

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anubhavmishra
This is amazing! I am really excited to see this happen from the big three.
Amazon, Google and Azure.

~~~
vivekf
I wish they did billing from an Indian entity with GST as well instead of
hitting us with massive exchange rate issues

~~~
jpatokal
That's part of the announcement, under "Pay in local currency": GCP now
supports billing in INR.

(Disclaimer: I work in GCP.)

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SoulMan
gcping.com still shows less latency to Singapore than Mumbai - From Hyderabad,
India.

~~~
rrrazdan
You are probably on Airtel or one of the providers that exclusively peers with
Airtel at the Chennai location for International traffic.

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nodesocket
$GOOG employees: any eta on the California region?

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alpb
Why do you need a California region? There’s already a west coast datacenter
in Oregon. I’m guessing the latency differences would be likely negligible.
That said there's plans for a Los Angeles region here:
[https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/](https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/)

(Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, but totally not working on datacenter
stuff.)

~~~
CydeWeys
The Pacific northwest has all of that delicious, cheap, reliable, non-
polluting hydroelectric power. It's really a logical location for regional
data centers, and Google is far from the only company making that same
decision.

I agree with you, I'm not seeing the big draw of California, especially given
the much more expensive electricity plus greater earthquake risk.

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farhanhubble
No GPU Instances sadly. I use AWS P2 from US west region and sometimes the
transfer speed to and fro my system is really low.

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susankim
I am really excited to see this happen from the big three. Amazon, Google and
Azure.

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olliej
I read the title as GOP and was incredibly confused :D

That said, I'm curious about why they choose Mumbai (similar to @amiturk) - is
it cable access, politics, land cost, ...?

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darklrd
This is awesome! Are there any plans to launch in Delhi region as well?

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nik736
Is there any way to see which facilities Google Cloud is using?

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selanki
Google is following AWS ,. Microsoft is also following AWS . Which is not
necessarily bad but doesn’t speak much of their innovation . The only play
they have against AWS is fear mongering about vendor lock-in which is highly
debatable anyways .

~~~
numbsafari
Oh, give me a break... where did Kubernetes come from? Whose LB solution
relies on DNS and whose uses BGP/ECMP for regional routing and failover? Who
offered HIPPA compliance without dedicated hosts and stupid markups first? Who
created BigQuery?

Look, both Google and AWS have areas where each excels over the other, but to
say that Google isn’t innovating is to say you are basically ignorant of their
offering.

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jaisal
NLB DynamoDB EMR even HIPAA without dedicated was on AWS first ... whatever
AWS does Google is trying to do better. Granted Kubernetes was google product
but what was so innovative about it when Docker and Linux container was
already there for a long time ... and now AWS has ECS

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numbsafari
You are factually incorrect about HIPPA and dedicated hosts. Amazon only
switched to the non-dedicated approach this year some time. Google has been
that way for at least two (if not longer).

EMR is basically hosted Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of a
system Google created and made famous.

Docker is based on cgroups, which was largely contributed by Google engineers.
And anyone deploying docker for distributed systems will tell you that you
need some kind of scheduler/orchestrator.

Amazon excels at packaging and bundling the work of others, and provides a
fairly robust enterprise management layer on top of it. CloudFormation, for
example, is much better than GCP’s Deployment Manager. Google is quickly
catching up in the enterprise management space as well, as they take on larger
customers who demand these abilities, but I still feel like AWS has a bit more
capability there.

You probably should have listed Lambda, which was a nice idea out of AMZN.

