Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Technology cloud regions

Following is an interesting high-level statistics, for the regional deployment of cloud services, on cloud platforms of few reputed vendors:

IBM Cloud:
The following regions are supported.
us-south
us-east
au-syd
eu-gb
eu-de

GCP:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/

AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/

Following is my analytical sense of this:
1) GCP and AWS provide many more cloud regions than IBM Cloud. The region coverage of GCP and AWS is almost same. A region is a particular geographic area where the cloud data-center is located. The user fetching the cloud hosted application from their nearest region, will result in lower latency and higher throughput. All cloud vendors provide an option to the merchant, to select the region where they'd like to host their cloud applications.
2) IBM supporting fewer regions, may even be good from the perspective of simplicity. IBM cloud regions seems to be uniformly distributed around the world. If building a truly global cloud hosted application, having fewer regions to think about may be a good thing. With this, it may be necessary to optimize the application at other parts of the infrastructure.
3) Although AWS is quite good for various reasons, it doesn't offer all services at all its regions. But overall, AWS is ok on this aspect.

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