Isn't that due to geography? I suspect many customers want to have one dc for southeast Asia and Singapore is in a better location than HK, esp if you also want to serve Indian customers from there (and potentially Australians). Customers with higher East-Asian traffic are likely to also have presence in Japan. I'd suspect HK demand is very regional, i.e. for projects based in HK.
Hong Kong, being the entrance to China as it once was, and arguably still is; the perfect stop to set up DC without the Chinese Firewall. There are many multinational and even some Mainland Chinese company HQ in HK. Hong Kong Stock exchange is still one of the largest stock exchange on the planet. Not to mention there is a nearly fixed exchanged rate between HKD and USD.
And in Reply to Google and AWS coming, they have been preannoucned and later postponed or canceled. So until they are actually up I am not putting too much faith into it. AWS wanted to set up in HK long time ago and due to whatever reason never started. Google purchased land in HK 5 years ago for building DC and later ( I think ) sold it off.
OVH came to HK in hope to establish its Asia DC, and due to some insane stupidity this is now in Singapore. Cloudflare could have had the Asia HQ in HK, and now it is in Singapore again. The point is, literally every single one turn to HK first and was hoping to start and do great here. HK lets them down every single time.
Very cool! Most of my users are in South East Asia. But, I live in France. So, it would be great, if you can give an option to change my location to see the latency.
Ah sorry, on mobile and I misread. Regions for Google are physical different locations. Zones are separate partions of a given region with their own power, networking, etc. I believe.
Doesn't AWS still advertise that their zones are at least 10 miles or so away from each other? Does it turn out that this is just completely unnecessary or why doesn't Google follow a similar approach? Honest question, I was always wondering if there's a need for physically separate locations if you could have two completely separated zones on one lot.
It’s highly unlikely that Amazon (or anyone) can reliably find or build datacenter space that is high quality _and_ within a few miles of other such space across all the regions they operate. If they had gone to to such lengths they would clearly state that zones are fully independent from each other. Instead they only say that about regions.[0] So even though I have worked at neither company I’m going to say their concept of a zone is mostly equivalent — independent in terms of power and network domains but in the same building or at most on the same property. This allows them to have the low latency that is touted between zones of a specific region.
Having the third zone means you can now run some pretty important services in Singapore, including Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, and Managed Instance Groups.
Also, connectivity within APAC is generally not great, you really want to avoid those round-trips to Tokyo or the US if you can.
Disclaimer: I work at GCP, but had nothing to do with this particular launch.
If you are in Asia that’s probably why? It’s very useful having AWS in an Ohio since it reduces the latency a bunch (I am based in Chicago ). Also if you need to have low ping times for global deployments .
It's interesting to me because of Southeast Asia and Google. On the Southeast Asia angle there's a burgeoning startup scene with companies like Grab, quick economic change, expat hotspots like Chiang Mai, and the choice of Singapore for servers even though it's a tiny and dense country. For Google there's catching up to AWS, machine learning, and Google's cloud lock in with things like Firebase. I voted it up because I hope to hear opinions about some or all of these things.
How was that intellectually stimulating or worthy of discussion among IT people or ‘hacker’ in general, seriously? Can’t interested people do a 30-second Google search instead?
and connection from hk to sg isn't exactly great either.