Google opens cloud platform in Sydney

Google has opened the new Sydney region for its cloud platform to customers, nine months after revealing plans to host infrastructure in Australia.

The web giant today launched three local zones for high availability - as planned - and with services spanning compute, storage, networking and big data.

PwC Australia, Monash University and Woodside Energy were among enterprise customers that welcomed the arrival of the local presence.

Woodside revealed at the end of last month that it was working with Google to push the limits of the cloud service as it looks to improve the speed at which it can derive insights from seismic data.

It is unclear whether it is using the local availability zone; the company today simply said Google cloud platform remained an “on-demand solution” for supercomputing resources.

PwC Australia’s backing of the local arrival of Google cloud platform points to a potential expansion of the public cloud services used in its “cloud-only” IT infrastructure.

iTnews revealed in March that PwC had adopted Google’s G-suite for workforce productivity, but the public cloud portion of its outsourced infrastructure was “mostly Amazon and a couple of small workloads in Azure”.

"The regional expansion of Google cloud platform to Australia will help enable PwC's rapidly growing need to experiment and innovate and will further extend our work with Google cloud,” PwC Australia CIO Hilda Clune said in a statement.

Google said it had "thousands" of customers in Australia already using some of its cloud services.

Since revealing plans in September last year to host its cloud platform in Sydney, the web giant has remained tight-lipped on when it would launch, and with how many services.

Google said tests had already confirmed significant latency improvements for existing cloud customers that had been hosting workloads in other availability zones and regions, such as Asia or the United States.

It promised further improvements once the Indigo cable system connecting Perth and Singapore is live in 2019. Google is part of a consortium of companies that has taken over the cable project.

For now, traffic runs in and out via several east coast paths to Asia and beyond.

Google said it had appointed Shine Solutions, Servian, 3WKS, Axalon, Onigroup, PwC, Deloitte, Glintech, Fronde and Megaport as certified GCP partners.