GCP arrives in the Nordics with a new region in Finland | Hacker News Reader

GCP arrives in the Nordics with a new region in Finland

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

29 pointsSami_Lehtinen16 comments

Perhaps the most sustainable GCP region, do any other cloud providers offer cooling by icy ocean waters?

There was Microsoft sinking a data center container in the ocean a couple days ago.

That was an experiment though, this is been "chugging" along for a while now.

For most of the year, the ambient air temperature here is below 20°C, so you can just ventilate, no need to warm the oceans.

There have also been some pilot projects to output the waste heat to municipal district heating systems, not sure if Google's center does that.

Telia Pitäjänmäki DC aims to waste heat recycling, this is green if something is. https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data...

As far as I can remember from high school, heat transfer is proportional to temperature difference, as well as coefficient of something-o-rather. I think icy water beats cool air on both of these.

We've just added GCP Finland to our Aiven database service so you can have managed Kafka, Cassandra, PostgreSQL etc clusters up and running in a few minutes in the new region https://aiven.io/blog/google-cloud-now-over-finland/

As a Swede, this is good news. I just wish Azure also would create a new region in the nordics.

Do you have much of a latency problem from the West Europe region in the Netherlands? I haven't noticed any problems with that from Norway. Even North Europe hasn't been problematic.

When Amazon releases their Swedish datacenters, they will be alone amongst the big three to not have anything in the Nordics.

There were news and promises from Microsoft to open major DC in Finland. But those just evaporated and nothing happened.

Not really, but you will always have some latency. I've found that West Europe is often better than "North Europe" (Ireland).

It's funny because I do not define Ireland as a part of "North europe" :P

Routing to Finland seems to be quite horrible. Traffic is looping via Sweden in many cases based on latency. So connectivity on capital area (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa) is around 18ms instead of just ~2 ms.

On the upside for Swedes, routing between europe-north1 and Stockholm seems good. Typically around 10 ms for a roundtrip.

Aiven.io engineers were able to offer the region one day after its release, marking their 71st region.

Great news for the Finnish people.

Still waiting for decent Firestore querying capabilities, though.

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