GCP opening a third zone in Singapore | Hacker News Reader

GCP opening a third zone in Singapore

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

108 pointsnealmueller33 comments

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.

Fear not, there's a Hong Kong GCP region opening later this year!

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/11/coming-in-2018-...

There is upcoming AWS region in hk: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-...

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.

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.

Do you know what kind of regulation is getting in the way?

"China"

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

Within a block of 1 Wilshire probably.

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

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...

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

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

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

Great tool! CloudHarmony is good too: https://cloudharmony.com/

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.

> give an option to change my location

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

Or VPNs. :)

Anyone got a map of where the 3 locations are?

Google themselves have a nice one: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

I mean the 3 datacenters in Singapore

I think they are all in Jurong

Ah sorry, on mobile and I misread. Regions for Google are physical different locations. Zones are separate partions of a given region with their own power, networking, etc. I believe.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/

Three zones doesn't mean three datacenters.

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

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.

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...

Do you have a source of that claim?

AFAIK regions are physically separated, zones are isolated from each other in the same region.

Jurong West: https://www.google.com.au/about/datacenters/inside/locations...

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

It's 11am there now. Why would it not?

If you are in Asia that’s probably why? It’s very useful having AWS in an Ohio since it reduces the latency a bunch (I am based in Chicago ). Also if you need to have low ping times for global deployments .

I was much more surprised by the sourdough article with over 600 points and iirc stayed at the top spot for many hours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946178

How was that intellectually stimulating or worthy of discussion among IT people or ‘hacker’ in general, seriously? Can’t interested people do a 30-second Google search instead?

It's interesting to me because of Southeast Asia and Google. On the Southeast Asia angle there's a burgeoning startup scene with companies like Grab, quick economic change, expat hotspots like Chiang Mai, and the choice of Singapore for servers even though it's a tiny and dense country. For Google there's catching up to AWS, machine learning, and Google's cloud lock in with things like Firebase. I voted it up because I hope to hear opinions about some or all of these things.

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.

But, AWS already launched a 3rd AZ in January: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252433676/AWS-opens-thir... For example, Aurora is now available in Singapore: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-au...

And they are launching in Hong Kong this year: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-...

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