Google has revealed its additional investment plans for growing Cloud business competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Alibaba, among others.
Google aims to increase its cloud business at a time when social media network Facebook is under pressure to remove paid news content and focus on customer driven activities to create more value for its readers.
Google was active in opening new data centers in 2017, while Amazon and Microsoft will be adding more. The hyperscale data center count will reach 500 before the end of 2019 from 400 in 2017, Synergy Research Group said.
The companies with the broadest data center footprint are cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google. Each has 45 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America, according to Synergy Research Group.
Oracle and Alibaba have broad data center presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the US (Apple, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Yahoo) or China (Tencent, Baidu).
Alibaba rocks
China-based cloud firm Alibaba said it is on track to overtake AWS as world’s top cloud computing services firm. In 2017, Alibaba Cloud had about one million paying users.
Simon Hu, senior vice-president of Alibaba Group and president of Alibaba Cloud, said: “We have taken on Amazon on all fronts as our benchmark over past three years. Some of our products have already exceeded theirs.”
Last year, Alibaba Cloud ranked third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud services market, according to research firm Gartner. The cloud division of Alibaba has achieved 126.5 percent growth in its revenue to $675 million in 2016, driven by China market, where it has a 40.7 percent share, according to Gartner.
Google Cloud on investment plans
Google has already made investment of $30 billion for improving its infrastructure over three years. Google indicates that it will continue its investment in Cloud business.
“Focus areas for investment will be data centers to subsea cables. Google is adding three new submarine cables, and five new regions as part of the growth strategy,” said Ben Treynor Sloss, VP, 24×7 in a blog post on January 16.
Google will open its Netherlands and Montreal regions in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong – with more to come. It will commission three subsea cables in 2019.
Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland; and the Hong Kong-Guam Cable system (HK-G), a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia, will support Google’s cloud customers.
Google said its network is the world’s largest — which by some accounts delivers 25 percent of worldwide internet traffic. Companies like PayPal leverage its network and infrastructure to run their businesses effectively.
“At PayPal, we process billions of transactions across the globe, and need to do so securely, instantaneously and economically. As a result, security, networking and infrastructure were key considerations for us when choosing a cloud provider,” said Sri Shivananda, chief technology officer of PayPal.
Curie will be the first subsea cable to land in Chile in almost 20 years. Once deployed, Curie will be Chile’s largest single data pipe. It will serve Google users and customers across Latin America.
Google is working with Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure to build a direct submarine cable system connecting the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland. This cable — built by TE SubCom — is expected to come online by the end of 2019.
Google is working with RTI-C and NEC on the Hong Kong-Guam cable system will enhance connectivity around customers in the Pacific.
The Google network has over 100 points of presence (map) and over 7,500 edge caching nodes (map).
The Google network consists of fiber optic links and subsea cables between 100+ points of presence, 7500+ edge node locations, 90+ Cloud CDN locations, 47 dedicated interconnect locations and 15 GCP regions.
Baburajan K
