#HTE

Google today announced the launch of its Osaka region, its second cloud region in Japan and seventh in Asia Pacific. With this, the company now offers its users a total of 20 regions, all of which feature at least three availability zones.

In Japan, the Osaka region joins Google’s Tokyo region and will offer lower latencies for local customers, Google notes, though Tokyo and Osaka are obviously pretty close, so that’s likely not a big difference. For businesses in Japan, having two geographically separate regions is a major boon as far as being able to add additional redundancies and disaster recovery is concerned, though.

“We’re looking forward to the Osaka cloud region,” says Tatsuhito Chiku, corporate officer, general manager, Information Technology Section at Asahi Group Holdings. “Using Google Cloud Platform services like BigQuery have enabled us to build a system with low latency and high resiliency, and the Osaka cloud region will further improve our system availability and achieve business continuity.”

It’s worth noting that Azure also currently offers two regions in Japan, though AWS only offers a single region at this time.

Like its competitors, Google continues to expand its data center availability across the globe. Kurian notes that the company has now spent $47 billion on its global infrastructure, which includes the likes of new data centers and dedicated links between them. Later this year, Google will also launch new regions in Seoul, Salt Lake City and Jakarta.