Dive Brief:

• Google announced Tuesday that its latest cloud region in Tokyo is now open for business.

• Known as asia-northeast1, the new region doubles the company’s presence in Asia. Google now has a total of six zones in Asia.

• Google said it’s tests show users in cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo and Nagoya experienced 50-85% lower latency on average when served from the Tokyo region compared to Taiwan.

Dive Insight:

In March, Google announced it was planning 12 new cloud data centers in the next 18 months as part of its strategy to better compete with rivals in the corporate cloud services space.

While more cloud regions will certainly reduce latency, Urs Hölzle, Google’s infrastructure leader, told attendees at this week’s Structure Conference that he envisions a day when enterprises won’t even need to consider the infrastructure underpinning the workloads they run. Instead, changes will be made on the provider side to ensure the latest, most efficient technology without enterprise customers even knowing when changes have been made.  

"So that means you can have a million customers who move to that new hardware platform, not knowing they did," said Hölzle, according to a CIO report. "Which means that you can really insert this new technology in a much faster cycle than you could if you did the same thing on-premises."