Google's Sydney cloud launch still months away

The launch of Google's Cloud Platform in Sydney is still months away, with the technology giant keeping tight-lipped on a debut date and the products that will be made available down under.

Sydney was one of 11 new regions for Google cloud announced in September last year.

At the time the company would only say that the region would come online in 2017.

At the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, Google's head of technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle said GCP would launch in Sydney after new regions in Singapore and Northern Virginia went live.

The pair will come online in the next two months, he said, and Sydney and London will follow "shortly after that".

Google declined to provide a specific launch date to iTnews.

It has committed to having three zones available in Sydney, but could launch with just two and expand later.

The company also won't say which Google Cloud Platform products will be available in Australia; it does not offer a full suite of GCP services in all regions.

However, in a side session at the conference Google software engineers revealed Virtual Private Cloud would be one of the GCP products available in Sydney before the end of the year.

Google has been on a hiring spree in Sydney to bolster its local operations in preparation for the launch.

As first reported by iTnews sister site CRN earlier this week, Google is currently recruiting for a head of Google cloud A/NZ, a head of APAC SMB partner operations, as well as several cloud solution architects.

The company announced three new cloud regions in the Netherlands, Canada, and California today.

Google is also dropping its prices for core GCP product Compute Engine and offering a "committed use" discount for customers who make long-term committments.

Signing up to a one or three-year deal can result in a discount of up to 57 percent off Compute Engine, Google said. The discounts are based on the total amount of CPU and RAM purchased.

General pricing for Compute Engine will also drop, by 5 percent in the US, 4.9 percent in Europe, and 8 percent in Tokyo, and the free tier trial has been extended from 60 days to one year, Google said.

Allie Coyne attended Google Cloud Next as a guest of Google