
GCP opening a third zone in Singapore - nealmueller
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/GCP-opens-a-third-zone-in-the-Singapore-region.html
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ksec
I am very sad Hong Kong loses out all the datacenter project to Singapore. all
due to idiotic government and regulatory.

and connection from hk to sg isn't exactly great either.

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dx034
Isn't that due to geography? I suspect many customers want to have one dc for
southeast Asia and Singapore is in a better location than HK, esp if you also
want to serve Indian customers from there (and potentially Australians).
Customers with higher East-Asian traffic are likely to also have presence in
Japan. I'd suspect HK demand is very regional, i.e. for projects based in HK.

~~~
ksec
Hong Kong, being the entrance to China as it once was, and arguably still is;
the perfect stop to set up DC without the Chinese Firewall. There are many
multinational and even some Mainland Chinese company HQ in HK. Hong Kong Stock
exchange is still one of the largest stock exchange on the planet. Not to
mention there is a nearly fixed exchanged rate between HKD and USD.

And in Reply to Google and AWS coming, they have been preannoucned and later
postponed or canceled. So until they are actually up I am not putting too much
faith into it. AWS wanted to set up in HK long time ago and due to whatever
reason never started. Google purchased land in HK 5 years ago for building DC
and later ( I think ) sold it off.

OVH came to HK in hope to establish its Asia DC, and due to some insane
stupidity this is now in Singapore. Cloudflare could have had the Asia HQ in
HK, and now it is in Singapore again. The point is, literally every single one
turn to HK first and was hoping to start and do great here. HK lets them down
every single time.

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mixmastamyk
What’s the status on Los Angeles? Been waiting a long time for that one.
Anyone know where it’s located?

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jpatokal
The public ETA on the Los Angeles region remains "2018":
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-
zones/#announc...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-
zones/#announced)

Your local friendly GCP sales rep can share better dates under NDA, and if
you're interested in early access, please sign up here:
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc8eJiKN4tu6CNPyFpA...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc8eJiKN4tu6CNPyFpAHMo5xWvsPTkcx_94I-o-x0JR283DfA/viewform?c=0&w=1)

Disclaimer: I work at GCP, but am not involved with new regions.

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QueensGambit
How much latency improvement should we expect by moving from US-central
(default) to Singapore?

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ImJasonH
Where are your users located? I built a tool to roughly measure latency
between your browser and various GCP regions:
[http://gcping.com](http://gcping.com)

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QueensGambit
Very cool! Most of my users are in South East Asia. But, I live in France. So,
it would be great, if you can give an option to change my location to see the
latency.

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sparewalking
> give an option to change my location

Don't we all? It's called teleportation.

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sulam
Or VPNs. :)

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mkj
Anyone got a map of where the 3 locations are?

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regnerba
Google themselves have a nice one:
[https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/](https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/)

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mkj
I mean the 3 datacenters in Singapore

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btian
Three zones doesn't mean three datacenters.

Just means there are separate sets of power, networking etc.

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dx034
Doesn't AWS still advertise that their zones are at least 10 miles or so away
from each other? Does it turn out that this is just completely unnecessary or
why doesn't Google follow a similar approach? Honest question, I was always
wondering if there's a need for physically separate locations if you could
have two completely separated zones on one lot.

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sulam
It’s highly unlikely that Amazon (or anyone) can reliably find or build
datacenter space that is high quality _and_ within a few miles of other such
space across all the regions they operate. If they had gone to to such lengths
they would clearly state that zones are fully independent from each other.
Instead they only say that about regions.[0] So even though I have worked at
neither company I’m going to say their concept of a zone is mostly equivalent
— independent in terms of power and network domains but in the same building
or at most on the same property. This allows them to have the low latency that
is touted between zones of a specific region.

[0] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-
re...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-
availability-zones.html)

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tozeur
Not on the topic of the article, but why would this post get over 30 votes in
two hours? Is this news that exciting?

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jpatokal
Having the third zone means you can now run some pretty important services in
Singapore, including Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, and Managed
Instance Groups.

Also, connectivity within APAC is generally not great, you really want to
avoid those round-trips to Tokyo or the US if you can.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP, but had nothing to do with this particular launch.

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ti_ranger
But, AWS already launched a 3rd AZ in January:
[https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252433676/AWS-opens-
thir...](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252433676/AWS-opens-third-
availability-zone-in-Singapore) For example, Aurora is now available in
Singapore: [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-
au...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-aurora-with-
mysql-compatibility-is-available-in-the-asia-pacific-singapore-region/)

And they are launching in Hong Kong this year:
[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-
in-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-hong-
kong/)

