from Hacker News

Google Cloud Platform sets a course for new horizons

by hurrycane on 9/29/16, 5:29 PM with 34 comments

• by mikecb on 9/29/16, 6:23 PM

  New regions in Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Finland, Frankfurt, London, Sao Paulo and N. Virgina, with 3 zones per region (2 in Fin and Sing)? That brings them to 37 (edit: soon 38 with a third zone in Oregon) zones in 14 regions. In addition, they're putting down building footprints in Alabama and Tennessee, which may become new regions in the future, and adding buildings in Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, and Belgium, which may become new zones. In March, they announced 10 new regions in 2017, and the above numbers account for only 8.

  AWS will have 40 zones in 16 regions in the same time period (based on their public announcements.

  Not sure about the AWS backbone though. GCP has access to dedicated fiber from the US to both the Pacific and South America on the order of 10Tbps, and that's just the wholly-owned stuff disclosed in public. Amazon is quite hush hush on their network.

• by georgewfraser on 9/29/16, 10:09 PM

  Buried in the BigQuery "Standard SQL" blog post is support for DELETE and UPDATE statements. This is HUGE for BigQuery - the biggest problem has always been that it's an append-only data warehouse.

  My company does ETL-as-a-service (https://fivetran.com/) and we've had beta support for BigQuery for the last few months using a somewhat crazy copy-the-table-every-time strategy. We're really excited to have DELETE and UPDATE and we'll be switching over in the next few days.

• by samspenc on 9/29/16, 6:50 PM

  "We’ve recently joined the ranks of Google’s billion-user products. Google Cloud Platform now serves over one billion end-users through its customers’ products and services."

  That is interesting. I understand that the enterprises running GCP reach a billion-plus people on GCP, but does that qualify GCP itself as one of Google's billion-plus products?

• by Ironlink on 9/29/16, 7:03 PM

  The managed Kubernetes across multiple clouds sounds very nice! Or am I reading too much into this? I would love to give GKE some access token to my AWS and have them manage the whole shebang.

  > "In our support of this feature, GKE customers will be able to build applications that can easily span multiple clouds"

• by s3r3nity on 9/29/16, 7:01 PM

  <Semi-Related Anecdote> I remember a friend of mine was working at Dropbox as an intern when they were only a few hundred employees, and we would tell me stories of these "R&D" brainstorm sessions - unofficial meetings where they would just spitball crazy ideas on where the industry was going or new product ideas, and collect them for future hackathons and the like (the best ones I'm guessing got put into the actual product roadmap.)

  My favorite idea he mentioned was this assertion that the industry was moving towards a "cloud-within-a-cloud", or "a cloud of clouds." We both laughed for a good few minutes over how silly Silicon Valley terminology could sound sometimes.

  Turns out this mysterious person was ahead of their time...</Semi-Related Anecdote>

• by yannovitch on 10/3/16, 8:53 AM

  To the Google Cloud Engineers out here : If I use GKE in your Frankfurt, London or Belgium DC, will I be subject to the Patriot Act,potentially allowing US government to look or take over my private data? If that's the case, I still prefer to go through all the big headaches of setting up manually Kubernetes on Swiss or French cloud computing offering, or on my own servers

• by skizm on 9/29/16, 8:04 PM

  I still haven't figured out how to run a blog sized web app with Java 8 or python 3 on a Google product that isn't in experimental mode yet.

  Where should I start if that's my goal?

• by esseti on 9/30/16, 6:20 PM

  but do they have anything like rds (postgress) and s3 (dome storage) from amazon?

• by sirchuckalot on 9/30/16, 2:47 AM

  Awesome news on the added regions.

  One issue I've found with GCP is the Support pricing compared to AWS. Next step from basic is $150 p/m for support on GCP (2 individuals) compared to around $29-$39 p/m on AWS (for 1 individual).

  Is GCP going to start offering support to 1-man dev teams with side projects? Stackexchange, communities, docs are only helpful up to a point.

• by josteink on 9/29/16, 6:06 PM

  This is all marketing blarb and zero substance.

  Oh. And G Suite? Thanks for rebranding Google Apps once again, without adding anything actually new. Now we'll have to update our documentation, marketing material and what not. Again.

  Just great.