Google opens second cloud region in Germany

Google has opened a second cloud region in Germany as part of its plan to invest $1.08 billion in German digital infrastructure by 2030.

Dubbed the Berlin-Brandenburg region, the new data center will be operational alongside the Frankfurt region and will offer services such as the Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, Virtual Private Cloud, Key Management System, Cloud Identity and Secret Manager.

Other services, such as Cloud Run, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud MemCache, Apigee, Cloud Redis, Cloud Spanner, Extreme PD, Cloud Load Balancer, Cloud Interconnect, BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Pub/Sub, are expected to be made available within six months of the launch of the region.

“The new region brings high-performance, low-latency services and products to customers of all sizes, from public sector organizations to small, medium, and large enterprises and startups in Germany and the European Union,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding that enterprises in the region will also benefit from key controls that allow them to maintain high security, data residency, and compliance standards, including specific data storage requirements.

The Berlin-Brandenburg region will be the company’s 12^th region in Europe and 38^th globally.  Other Google Cloud regions in Europe include locations such as Milan, Paris, Zurich, Warsaw, Madrid, Turin, Belgium, Finland, The Netherlands, and London.

AWS, Oracle, and Microsoft Azure also have at least one region each in Germany.

Google Cloud has been investing heavily in opening more cloud regions to compete with larger rivals such as AWS and Microsoft.

In March, Google launched a second region in the Middle East. In October last year, Google announced it would open new regions across Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden to supplement the regions in New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, and Mexico.  

Rival public cloud services providers, such as Microsoft and Oracle, too have revealed plans to expand their cloud region footprint. In July last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company would launch 10 new cloud regions over the following year.

Similarly, in June 2022, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said the company expected to add another six regions in the following year. It launched two of these new sovereign regions in the European Union the following month. AWS, too, has been expanding its global cloud footprint. In November last year, it launched a second region in India, and in March it made a cloud region available in Malaysia.