Google will be setting up a cloud data center in Mumbai which will be operational by 2017. The data center dubbed as “Google Cloud Regions” will also be set up in other location including Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt. The company also plans to set up ‘Cloud Regions’ in more geographical locations next year.
The data center expansion is aimed at growing its cloud business—Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—to support more software environments, and applications, the company said. Google is also updating its cloud infrastructure to not only power its customer’s solution, but also Gmail and Android. It claims that its cloud solutions for enterprise and individuals now “serves over 1 billion end-users through its customers’ products and services.”
New features in Google Cloud Platform
With its cloud business expansion, Google will offer more features under Kubernetes—an open source system offered under Google Container Engine (GKE) for automating deployment and managing cloud-hosted applications. The company’s fully managed data centers will be upgraded with new cloud-based data mining/analytics features like Google BigQuery support, and better machine learning features using Google Cloud Dataflow. More here.
In addition, the company has announced launch of a new team named ‘Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE)’, consisting of Google engineers. These engineers will directly work with customers who use the Google Cloud Platform. Interestingly, the new team has been already deployed and being tested with Niantic as they launched Pokemon Go. Google will offer more updates on this in the future.
Apigee acquisition
Google appears bullish with its cloud business with geographical expansion and addition of new features. The company had signed a definitive agreement to acquire US-based Apigee, an API management company to enhance its cloud business in early September. A Reuters report pegs the size of the deal at $625 million. This was Google’s second acquisition in the cloud business space: In July it bought Anvato, a cloud based platform to scale media processing and workflows in the cloud.
Cloud data centers in India
Google’s data center expansion into India is also aimed to take on other cloud business that have already setup their units in the country.
-Amazon’s Mumbai data centers under its AWS platform went operational in February after the announcement in June last year.
-Microsoft already has already deployed 3 cloud data centers under it Azure Cloud services in India that went live in September 2015. The sites include Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai.
-IBM also set up its “public” cloud center in Chennai in October last year. It has another data center in Mumbai as well.
-CloudFlare also owns three data centers in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi, and plans on setting up more nodes in the future.
Competition
Amazon Web Services (AWS) had earlier acquired Elemental Technologies for $500 million in September last year. Months later during their Q4 2015 earnings Amazon said that AWS had sales of $2.405 billion, a growth of 69% y-o-y.
IBM on the other hand had acquired live streaming provider UStream in January. The company then reported that revenue from its cloud, analytics and security business increased by 12% year-on-year to $8.3 billion.
Microsoft’s cloud unit Azure Media Services reported a revenue growth of 120% with the usage of the platform doubling year over year during Q3 2016.
