Google Cloud finally comes to Sydney today

Google has finally fired up local availability of its Google Cloud Platform after hyping up its arrival for months.

The tech giant will offer three availability zones for the platform in Sydney starting today. A handful of services are available at launch, which includes compute, big data, storage and networking. App Engine and Datastore will come at a later date.

Google Cloud platform managing director APJ Rick Harshman told CRN that customers wanting to migrate to local availability zones can contact one of its partners, or Google's customer engineering team to help with the migration.

Google's local partners include Dialog Information Technology, Shine Solutions, Servian, 3WKS, Axalon, Onigroup, Glintech, Fronde and Megaport, as well as consulting giants PwC and Deloitte. Google also mentioned some of its big name Australian cloud customers, such as PwC, Monash University and Woodside.

“The partner ecosystem is incredibly important to be successful in the cloud market, including in Australia,” said Harshman. “We see from customers that having the choice to store data locally is really important, and for large storage, that really opens up opportunities to partners.”

Google has hyped up the local launch of its cloud platform since September last year when it announced plans to bring the infrastructure and platform-as-a-service offering to Sydney.

At the time Harshman told CRN that Google had received an "enormous amount of requests and interest from system integrators and managed service providers in Australia".

Google Cloud Platform ranks third in market share behind market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google is using pricing as a unique selling point to woo customers, such as sustained use discounts, discounting users after the fact based on historic consumption.

"Our performance testing shows 80 percent to 95 percent reductions in round-trip time (RTT) latency when serving customers from New Zealand and Australian cities such as Sydney, Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, compared to using regions in Singapore or Taiwan," Google wrote in a blog post.

During the Cloud Next conference in March, Google announced it was dropping prices for core GCP product Compute Engine and offering a "committed use" discount for customers that make long-term commitments. Google said that customers that sign up to a one or three-year deal could be discounted as much as 57 percent off Compute Enginge based on the total amount of CPU and RAM purchased.