Google Cloud Platform opens new regions in Asia Pacific and Play with Moby is introduced.

New GCP Regions

Last year I gave a brief overview of the state of regions for the 3 best known cloud providers. At the time, it was clear that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was far behind in coverage. A situation that must have clearly hurt them in the market. But they’ve been working on improving this and in the past 2 weeks alone have opened up 2 new regions.

The first one, opened on the 14th of June, was Singapore, but obviously the more interesting one for me was opened on the 20th in Sydney. As expected the new region doesn’t have all of the GCP features, but the main items are definitely available. Now, I gave my opinion about GCP after the OnBoard event I did in April and haven’t seen anything since to change my opinion. For certain things, especially Docker/Kubernetes and machine learning, it’s definitely better than AWS. For most other functionalities the only advantage is price, but price should not be your main motivation for getting into the cloud¹. That said, I expect that there will be plenty of demand for the new regions.

One other interesting tidbit in the Sydney announcement is that Google is working on new network infrastructure to tie all the data centers together. This is an area where you can see the advantage of GCP being in the same data centers as the “regular” Google services. I assume this infrastructure will have advantages for that part of the business and GCP is along for the ride. After all, putting in sea cables isn’t exactly a cheap thing but it will give GCP an advantage.

Play With Moby

Play with Docker has been around for a while as a way to try out things with Docker. It basically acts as a free temporary environment where you can run a number of instances² with Docker containers on them. These are useful if you just want to quickly try something, or you don’t have Docker running locally³. Obviously, that means Play with Docker and alternatives like Katacoda are useful for training purposes. Not in the least because it prevents everyone from needing to download the various images or the usual ensuring that their local environment is set up properly.

Now we’ve got a new player in this space however, Play with Moby. As the name implies, Play with Moby is used to demonstrate Moby instead of Docker. Which means that it allows you to define the whole set of Moby functionalities in the yaml format it requires. As the goal of the project is to make its parts interchangeable, this will allow you to switch and quickly see what it results in.