Google arrives at London datacentre party
Google follows AWS and Microsoft in opening London datacentre
Google has launched its first datacentre in the UK, joining public cloud competitors Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in setting up shop in London.
The cloud provider's London presence was first announced last year, among plans to build nine new datacentres globally over the coming months.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers can now run applications and store data in one of London's three datacentre zones.
"Incredible user experiences hinge on performant infrastructure," said GCP product manager Dave Stiver.
"GCP customers throughout the British Isles and western Europe will see significant reductions in latency when they run their workloads in the London region.
"In cities like London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Amsterdam our performance testing shows 40-80 per cent reductions in round-trip time latency when serving customers from London compared with the Belgium region."
Google has joined cloud market leaders AWS and Microsoft in launching a London region, while IBM also recently strengthened its UK presence by announcing four new facilities.
London is Google's tenth datacentre region globally and joins Belgium as the second in Europe. Further European regions are set to follow in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.
Chasing the leaders
AWS and Microsoft are the frontrunners in the public cloud market, according to Gartner, with Google ahead of a chasing pack that includes Alibaba Cloud, IBM and Oracle — which recently launched a government cloud offering in the UK.
Gartner said that Google is typically chosen by customers as a secondary cloud provider, behind a strategic relationship with another provider, but that organisations that are competing with Amazon in other industries are increasingly turning to Google as an alternative.
Just last month American retail giant Walmart reportedly told its developers not to use AWS after its Amazon parent company announced the acquisition of Whole Foods Market.