Google Launches Its First Cloud Data Center on West Coast

Google has brought online its first West Coast cloud data center, promising US and Canadian cloud users on or close to the coast a 30 to 80 percent reduction in latency if they use the new region instead of the one in central US, which was closest to them before the new region launched.

This data center in Oregon isn’t the first Google data center on the West Coast. The company has had a data center campus in the Dalles, Oregon, for a decade. The launch means this is the first time Google’s cloud services are served out of Oregon in addition to other Google services, such as search or maps.

With the new cloud data center online, the company said its cloud users in cities like Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles should expect to see big performance improvements if they choose to host their virtual infrastructure in the new region, called us-west1.

See also: What Cloud and AI Do and Don't Mean for Google's Data Center Strategy

The launch is part of an effort Google kicked off recently to expand its global cloud data center infrastructure as it competes with cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of whom are far ahead in the amount of cloud availability regions. The company said in March it would add 10 data center locations to support its cloud services by both leasing data center space and building its own facilities.

One of the planned new cloud data center locations on the list will be in Japan, the company has disclosed.

See also: Nadella: We'll Build Cloud Data Centers Wherever Demand Takes Us

The Oregon cloud region has been launched with three initial services: Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Container Engine, the company said in a blog post announcing the launch Wednesday. The region includes two Compute Engine zones for high-availability applications, which usually means there are two separate data halls, each with its own independent infrastructure.

“A zone usually has power, cooling, networking, and control planes that are isolated from other zones, and most single failure events will affect only a single zone,” Google says on its cloud platform website.

Oregon is Google cloud’s fifth availability region. The other ones are Central US, Eastern US, Western Europe, and Eastern Asia.

A lot more detail about Google's cloud data center strategy in this presentation by Joe Kava, the man in charge of the company's data center operations: