Google Cloud just launched its 37th region in Qatar cementing its global footprint and putting it in the top tier among public cloud providers.9 more regions are in the pipeline which will add the total number to 48 second to Azure & oracle cloud.
The top cloud providers have been in a race to establish their presence in EMEA because of the growth of new companies and also the landing of major subsea cables in various cities making connectivity simpler and faster.
Qataris will benefit most from the new cloud region as it promises to create jobs and a wide range of opportunities. Google Cloud however is not the first cloud provider in Qatar, Microsoft Azure opened its region in 2022. AWS also has a region in the neighboring country of Bahrain that opened in 2019.
A big difference between Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and I tried it myself is pricing. Launching a virtual machine instance in the same machine family and a similar boot disk in the Qatar region costs $30 in GCP and $50 in Azure a difference of $20 for the same VM.
cloud pricing puts into account a lot of things like the cost of power in the region, labour & taxation among other things but having 2 similar services costing differently in the same country is a no-brainer regarding which cloud provider to choose.
the new Qatar region does not have all the products as would have in the US or Europe regions but this is not a problem as supply will grow with demand. It makes no financial sense to power thousands of servers and cool them yet over 50% of them are unused.
popular services like CloudSQL, app engine, Kubernetes, and vertex AI are not yet available in the Qatar region but if you need to run services like cloud run, compute engine, spanner & load balancing among many others they have you sorted.
Africa will benefit more from this region especially as we now have high-capacity undersea cables like the new 2 Africa cable and the Peace cable among many others that have increased the continent’s internet capacity 100-fold. All of Google cloud PoPs are interconnected using these high-speed undersea cables, companies can use direct peering or cloud interconnect to manage their infrastructure with the lowest latencies.
African enterprises will also benefit greatly when google cloud opens its new region in south africa which will be its 1st in the continent. with the availability of innovative cloud products, businesses are able to meet the growing demand of consumers and governments in a fluid way without worrying about the underlying infrastructure which is abstracted by the cloud.
with the proliferation of AI and ML, many startups and companies will need high-powered machines to test or improve their models that need high-powered GPUS that are expensive to purchase. cloud computing offers such solutions at a fraction of the cost meaning companies save money & have a faster time to market.
