Google opens sixth European cloud region in Zurich

Google has announced the opening of its sixth European cloud region. This is Zurich in Switzerland, the company’s nineteenth cloud region worldwide. The region consists of three availability zones, which means that it consists of three separate data centres, says Silicon Angle.

According to Google, the three availability zones even provide high availability workloads. “Hybrid cloud users can seamlessly integrate new and existing deployments using our regional partner ecosystem and through two dedicated, interconnected points of presence,” said the company in a blog post.

Furthermore, the new region should provide lower latency access to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products and services for organisations working in Switzerland. These include Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery. “Hosting applications in the new region can improve delays for end users in Switzerland by up to 10 milliseconds.”

In addition, the Zurich region also includes the private, software-defined Cloud Interconnect network. This network enables a quick and private link with other regions. This will allow customers to access the Internet giant’s services that are currently not available in the newly added region, with similarly low delays.

Strict rules

However, Switzerland is different from the other five locations in Europe. This is because the country is not a member of the European Union, which means that different privacy laws apply. It is often said that this is one of the strictest rules in the world.

The plans for the Zurich region were announced in May last year. Then the company also said it was planning to open a new region in Finland. That region should go online later this year. A region is already active in the Netherlands, which was opened at the beginning of 2018. This region has a different functionality than the existing data centre in Eemshaven.