Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has extended its reach in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) with a second region in Melbourne.
Why does this matter?
Having two regions inside Australia allows for customers to extend their architecture for highly available or disaster recoverable solutions. Google now join Azure (who has 3) as having multiple regions inside Australia, no doubt we will keep a close eye on AWS whom were the first public cloud provider to enter Sydney many moons ago.
What’s different about Google’s Regions?
The distinguishing network feature that sets GCP apart from its rivals is how they allow customers to design their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). GCP allow for subnets in the single VPC to span across as many regions as you’d like. You have the ability to create a single globally distributed VPC with subnets in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Build a logical DMZ zone that has subnets in each region for your globally distributed web services. Unlike the other cloud providers whom their software defined networks are region specific and peering must be setup that incurs bandwidth usage and connection charges. Thoughts go through my head as to how you would build a globally distributed VPC with local on-ramp for your regions on-premises networks. None the less, allowing for your traffic from Asia to Europe to traverse Google’s backhaul could makes life easier. The devil is in the detail, as what is also unique to Google is the VM-VM egress charges with cross region. Which is kind of saying the same thing as peering, just putting the price on a different object. All things to carefully think about when planning your cloud deployments. Maybe in some circumstances based on the pricing model, Google outweighs the other heavy weight hitters.
What will be interesting to see is whether with Sydney and Melbourne onboarding soon, will the VM-VM egress pricing update to support Egress between Google Cloud regions within Australia. Currently if I look at what is written on the tin I’d assume that it falls under Egress between Google Cloud regions within Oceania (per GB) at $0.08, where Oceania includes Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding Pacific Ocean islands such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji. This region excludes Hawaii.
Google have a nice inter-Region Google Cloud Inter-region latency and throughput pivot table that gets metrics form a Perfkit test. The current lowest latent packet is to asia-southeast1 Singapore at ~92ms, we will definitely knock the socks off of that in ANZ with Melbourne to Sydney.
Google Cloud Inter-Region Latency and Throughput › Inter-region latency and throughput
Googles VPC network Example (here)
