Google opens first cloud region in Indonesia
Google has opened its first cloud region in Indonesia, offering three cloud zones and its usual suite of services including Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Google Kubernetes Engine, and BigQuery. The launch follows in the footsteps of Chinese cloud competitor Alibaba, which opened its second data centre in the Asian market last year.
Located in Jakarta, Google's ninth cloud region in Asia-Pacific, which also comprises Singapore and South Korea, currently supports local customers such as e-commerce platform Tokopedia, telco PT XL Axiata, and Bank Rakyat Indonesia. The new site pushes Google's global cloud footprint to 24 regions and 73 zones across 17 markets.
Google added in a blog post Wednesday that it planned to run 150,000 hands-on training labs in Indonesia this year, which would include free Google Cloud Platform training sessions, Cloud OnBoard training, and digital scholarships to help professionals gain certification on the cloud platform.
Indra Utoyo, Bank Rakyat Indonesia's director of digital, IT, and operation, said the bank currently taps Apigee, Google Maps Platform APIs (application programming interfaces), and Cloud Vision to facilitate its development work. Utoyo added that it adopts a hybrid cloud model, running some of its operations on-premise.
XL Axiata's chief information and digital officer Yessie D Yosetya said the telco is targeting to move 70% of its workloads to the cloud over the next three years and has deployed Anthos to automate and scale workloads across its "hybrid- and multi-cloud environments".
Yosetya said Anthos would be "a natural fit" as it enables the organisation to adopt containers while letting Google, which created Kubernetes, manage the container infrastructure for the telco.
Google's Indonesian launch comes amidst increased competition for Asia's cloud market, with Alibaba in April unveiling a 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) investment to drive its cloud business over the next three years. The Chinese tech giant said the funds would go towards infrastructure development including servers, chips, network, and operating system.
Alibaba last year opened a second data centre in Indonesia, doubling its local capacity, and then had said it was the only global public cloud provider to operate local data centres in the country. The two sites offered a range of services including database, networking, storage, and machine learning for artificial intelligence applications.
Google also spent the last couple of years expanding its cloud footprint in the region, which grew from five cloud regions in 2018 to its current nine. The US vendor's global cloud revenue clocked $2.77 billion in the first quarter, up 52% from the year before. It does not break down its cloud revenue or customer numbers by region.
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