Google today announced that it's opening a new region for several Google Cloud Platform services. The new region, dubbed us-east, will be depending on Google's data center facility in Berkeley County, South Carolina.
Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud SQL will come first, followed by Google App Engine. The new region has not shown up in the Google Cloud Console yet.
Geographical availability is a critical element in Google's battle -- against Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and other companies -- to take a significant part of the public cloud computing market, right up there with features and cost. So it's reasonable to expect Google to keep standing up regions for the Google Cloud Platform in the years to come.
Until now Google was limited to the us-central1-a, us-central1-b, us-central1-c, and us-central1-f zones -- out of Google's Council Bluffs, Iowa, data center site -- in the U.S. Outside the country, Google Cloud Platform also has a presence in Europe and Asia.
"This will open up our services to customers that were waiting on a US East Coast presence," senior product manager Jay Judkowitz wrote in a blog post on today's news. "Besides lowering latency to those on the US East Coast, the addition of the South Carolina location gives customers across North America the capability to build multi-region disaster recovery plans for their applications running on Google Cloud Platform."