Underlining the increasing importance of Far-Eastern markets, Google has formed a new Asia region and two new zones – “asia-east1-a” and “asia-east1-b” – to deliver better latency for Asian developers using its Cloud Platform offer.

This follows the company’s opening of two data centers in Taiwan and Singapore last December to handle the growing number of internet users in the region.

The Asia zones use Intel’s newer Ivy Bridge processors - Google’s European and US zones use older the Sandy Bridge – for increased performance, Google said.

Commentators have noted that this means Google now joins AWS and Microsoft in being able to span the planet with acceptable latency.

"Now, more developers in Asia Pacific can experience the speed and scale of Google’s infrastructure with the expansion of support for Cloud Platform," Howard Wu, head of Asia Pacific marketing for Google Cloud Platform said in a blog post.

He said the Google Cloud Platform website and the developer console will also be available in Japanese and traditional Chinese as well as English.

These websites have updated use cases, documentation and tools to help local developers get started with Google Cloud Platform.

The region also launches with Andromeda – the codename for Google’s network virtualization stack – which already powers its US-central1-b and Europe-west1-a zones.