Google Cloud Platform Finland, No National Connectivity

That's a really interesting site. I happen to be reading this in Mauritius, and the "closest" data center (using the classical Ping metric) is London; I guess that's the old trade routes in action.

In Helsinki, I'm seeing (on Telia 4G) the Finland region quickest at 50ms and the rest >60ms. Similarily on DNA cable, the Finland region is quickest at 42ms and the rest >55ms.

Perhaps they peer with (some of) the ISPs but not (yet) with other DCs?

"Designed for Speed - Hosting applications in the new region can improve latencies by up to 65% for end-users in the Nordics and by up to 88% for end-users in Eastern Europe, compared to hosting them in the previously closest region." https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/finland/

The cpuid is virtualized and reports virtual hardware so that compatibility and consistency across regions are maintained.

The actual hardware is likely much more recent, and GCE allows you some control over which version is used and reported: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/specify-min-...

According to the Google Cloud Compute documentation [1] the VMs usable by customers are run on Skylake processors.

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