Roughly 60 percent of the world’s population lives in Asia Pacific, so it is no wonder that cloud computing vendors are making the region the new battleground for their services.
Amazon has been strong in the region for a long time, but other vendors are quickly playing catch-up. Last month, Microsoft made its Azure cloud platform generally available in China, and just this past week Google (News - Alert) launched its first two Compute Engine zones in the Asia Pacific region.
The move by Google last week didn’t come as much of a surprise; the company opened a new data center in Taiwan late last year, and bringing its cloud platform to the region seemed like a natural extension. But even if it was not much of a surprise, the move brings big implications for the region.
Software developers now can deploy their cloud-based applications in two Compute Engine zones in Asia Pacific through Google, similar to how Google has structured its cloud offerings in the U.S. and Europe.
The new data centers will use the same Andromeda network virtualization stack as Google’s other data centers, and they will benefit from Google’s transparent maintenance, which ensures that cloud apps keep running even while the company performs routine maintenance on the data center. Transparent maintenance is something the company doesn’t yet offer in its European zones.
The new cloud offerings also will take advantage of the Ivy Bridge processors by Intel (News - Alert), an upgrade from the older Sandy Bridge processors in its other data centers.
In addition to Compute Engine, software makers also will be able to deploy Cloud SQL databases in the region and use Cloud Storage to store data.
Even though much software is still premise-based, the cloud model of application deployment is the wave of the future. It is not a question of if but when a particular software solution will move to the cloud because the flexibility and easy of use that comes from a cloud deployment, both from the developer’s perspective and that of the buyer, is unmatched.
Companies such as UNICOM (News - Alert) have picked up on this trend, and have started to help developers not only offer their applications in appliance form, but also in virtual appliance form that enables companies to easily deploy the applications in cloud environments.
UNICOM’s cloud computing solution to applications deployment is a natural extension of its application virtualization work, and it helps developers offer far greater flexibility, efficiency and scalability to their offerings.
There’s a good reason why cloud vendors are fighting for market share in Asia Pacific and elsewhere: The cloud is both the present and the future.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi