[harshal]

Geographic reach is the significant thing holding GCP back at this point - despite being ahead on the tech. Not having a Singapore presence (or anything closer to India) basically kills it as a serious option for many Indian companies. I personally know of a couple of startups personally who would have loved to use GCP since they actually want to use things like BigQuery, but went with AWS due to this.

They have so far just mentioned they are adding two regions soon - but nothing about where. I fear its just additional options in Europe or something ... 2017 is still too far out for a startup considering options today.

Edit: Oh .... looks like I missed the announcement that the two new regions are Tokyo and Oregon. Looks like India is out of luck for now.

[boulos]

Hmm, our Taiwan region (asia-east1) is too far? We've had a number of customers from India, and thanks to our points-of-presence throughout the world it's not so simple as "AWS is in Singapore, Google is in Taiwan". That said, we hear you, and you can imagine we've done a lot of asking customers (and losing deals!) on the basis of where we are and where we could be.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

[harshal]

Yes, Taiwan is too far. I personally know of an adtech startup that is going through contortions because they need to stay below latency limits on specific ad exchanges and those exchanges are located in Singapore. Taiwan is certainly way to far for them.

There are other instances where I think additional ~50ms latency diff to from India to Taiwan matters much less and I am dubious if it is material. But what matters if that the difference exists and people believe it does matter.

[poooogles]

We're squeezing by in Taiwan just about, if anything changes networking wise though we're going to have to diversify to more providers.

If you're struggling to respond within 50ms anyway then you're going to have a bad time with the added latency. Thankfully our 95th percentile is around 20ms.

We are however having to go into AWS for Aus/NZ which is a pain.

[gumshuda]

AWS is coming to Mumbai(IN) in near future. It will make it give much better performance for us so right now investing time in GCE is difficult to justify.