Google’s newest cloud platform is aiming at the media and entertainment industry by creating a new cloud region in Los Angeles. The new cloud platform will be launched in July and will be referred to as us-west2.
The Los Angeles cloud region, the fifth Google Cloud Platform in the US, will consist of three zones. The other areas in which Google has cloud platforms are Virginia, Iowa, Oregon and South Carolina. Also, the Google Cloud Platform already exists in 12 other countries.
Google plans to create cloud regions in Zurich, Osaka and Hong Kong.
The Los Angeles cloud region is scheduled to open next month. Google’s main target market is movie studios and production houses. With a cloud region in close proximity, production houses and studios will be able to quickly access compute resources.
Image of a data center (https://pixabay.com/en/electrical-data-center-2476782/)
Google Transfer Appliance for Moving Data to the Cloud
At the same time, Google’s Transfer Appliance is now publicly available in the US. It helps users move data to Cloud Storage. A high-capacity server, the Transfer Appliance fits into standard data center racks and can transfer large amounts of data to the Google Cloud Platform.
If a user wants to upload more than 20TB of data, or the transfer will take more than a week, Google recommends the use of the Google Transfer Appliance.
The Google Cloud Filestore: A Gift for Studios and Production Houses
For workflows that need a file system interface and a shared file system, Google will launch the Google Cloud Filestore next month in beta. The managed Network Attached Storage (NAS) is targeted at rendering workflows that run in-house in render farms.
In the future, Google plans to migrate rendering capabilities to the cloud, at the same time allowing creators and artists to collaborate. When one renders a movie, the rendering job normally runs across render farms of computer machines. All the compute machines mount a shared file system.
At the moment, most production studios use on premise machines and files. Google Filestore, however, gives studios and production houses a cloud option.
Will This Make Google Bigger than Azure and AWS?
Even with these new features, it is still uncertain whether Google will unseat Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure: the two main leaders in cloud resource provision. The Synergy Research Group reports that AWS beat Azure and Google in Q1 of 2018, making it the largest cloud provider.
AWS also beat IBM, Alibaba, Salesforce, and Tencent in every region. Microsoft came second in every region except the Asia Pacific, where Alibaba held the second position behind AWS. Similarly, Google ranked third in all regions except the Asia Pacific.
