Google has opened a new region for its Cloud Platform in Las Vegas, bringing its total to 23 regions around the world.
The Las Vegas region will provide business continuity, allowing US customers to distribute workloads across four western regions - Los Angeles, Oregon, Salt Lake City, and now Las Vegas. Like all regions on Google Cloud, the region has three availability zones, which means separate data centers with their own power and cooling, directly connected with fiber.
What computes in Vegas can stay in Vegas
The three zones of the new Las Vegas region are apparently all in one site in Henderson, Nevada - Google hasn't mentioned any other facilities in the area. This is a different approach from regions in Amazon's AWS, which are normally geographically separated to make sure that one incident cannot disable more than one of them.
The new Henderson facility has been built for $600 million, but the costs were eased by around $25 million in tax breaks from the Nevada state government, lined up in 2018 before the company fully committed to the project.
The new region offers most of the Google Cloud services, but doesn't yet have some newer ones such as ICloud Functions, Cloud Run, Cloud HSM and Secret Manager. It's been announced in a blog post which tells new customers how to sign up.
Despite its efforts, Google Cloud Platform is still running a poor third in cloud infrastructure, behind the leader AWS and Microsoft's Azure. A Synergy report in February appeared to give it less than 10 percent market share, compared to around 35 percent for AWS, and more than 20 percent for Microsoft.
