4 ms·

GCP arrives in the Nordics with a new region in Finland

29 points by Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago

lazharichir 8y ago
Great news for the Finnish people. Still waiting for decent Firestore querying capabilities, though.
thomasfedb 8y ago
Perhaps the most sustainable GCP region, do any other cloud providers offer cooling by icy ocean waters?
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  There was Microsoft sinking a data center container in the ocean a couple days ago.
  - thomasfedb 8y ago
    That was an experiment though, this is been "chugging" along for a while now.
- jusssi 8y ago
  For most of the year, the ambient air temperature here is below 20°C, so you can just ventilate, no need to warm the oceans. There have also been some pilot projects to output the waste heat to municipal district heating systems, not sure if Google's center does that.
  - Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago
    Telia Pitäjänmäki DC aims to waste heat recycling, this is green if something is. https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data-center https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data...
  - thomasfedb 8y ago
    As far as I can remember from high school, heat transfer is proportional to temperature difference, as well as coefficient of something-o-rather. I think icy water beats cool air on both of these.
staticelf 8y ago
As a Swede, this is good news. I just wish Azure also would create a new region in the nordics.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  Do you have much of a latency problem from the West Europe region in the Netherlands? I haven't noticed any problems with that from Norway. Even North Europe hasn't been problematic.
  - hajhatten 8y ago
    When Amazon releases their Swedish datacenters, they will be alone amongst the big three to not have anything in the Nordics.
    - Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago
      There were news and promises from Microsoft to open major DC in Finland. But those just evaporated and nothing happened.
  - staticelf 8y ago
    Not really, but you will always have some latency. I've found that West Europe is often better than "North Europe" (Ireland). It's funny because I do not define Ireland as a part of "North europe" :P
Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago
Routing to Finland seems to be quite horrible. Traffic is looping via Sweden in many cases based on latency. So connectivity on capital area (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa) is around 18ms instead of just ~2 ms.
- hotdog97 8y ago
  On the upside for Swedes, routing between europe-north1 and Stockholm seems good. Typically around 10 ms for a roundtrip.
oskari 8y ago
We've just added GCP Finland to our Aiven database service so you can have managed Kafka, Cassandra, PostgreSQL etc clusters up and running in a few minutes in the new region https://aiven.io/blog/google-cloud-now-over-finland/ https://aiven.io/blog/google-cloud-now-over-finland/
ksbuzzell 8y ago
Aiven.io engineers were able to offer the region one day after its release, marking their 71st region.

29 points by Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago

lazharichir 8y ago

Great news for the Finnish people. Still waiting for decent Firestore querying capabilities, though.

thomasfedb 8y ago

Perhaps the most sustainable GCP region, do any other cloud providers offer cooling by icy ocean waters?

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
There was Microsoft sinking a data center container in the ocean a couple days ago.
- thomasfedb 8y ago
  That was an experiment though, this is been "chugging" along for a while now.
jusssi 8y ago
For most of the year, the ambient air temperature here is below 20°C, so you can just ventilate, no need to warm the oceans. There have also been some pilot projects to output the waste heat to municipal district heating systems, not sure if Google's center does that.
- Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago
  Telia Pitäjänmäki DC aims to waste heat recycling, this is green if something is. https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data-center https://www.telia.fi/yrityksille/english/telia-helsinki-data...
- thomasfedb 8y ago
  As far as I can remember from high school, heat transfer is proportional to temperature difference, as well as coefficient of something-o-rather. I think icy water beats cool air on both of these.

staticelf 8y ago

As a Swede, this is good news. I just wish Azure also would create a new region in the nordics.

tallanvor 8y ago
Do you have much of a latency problem from the West Europe region in the Netherlands? I haven't noticed any problems with that from Norway. Even North Europe hasn't been problematic.
- hajhatten 8y ago
  When Amazon releases their Swedish datacenters, they will be alone amongst the big three to not have anything in the Nordics.
  - Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago
    There were news and promises from Microsoft to open major DC in Finland. But those just evaporated and nothing happened.
- staticelf 8y ago
  Not really, but you will always have some latency. I've found that West Europe is often better than "North Europe" (Ireland). It's funny because I do not define Ireland as a part of "North europe" :P

Sami_Lehtinen 8y ago

Routing to Finland seems to be quite horrible. Traffic is looping via Sweden in many cases based on latency. So connectivity on capital area (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa) is around 18ms instead of just ~2 ms.

hotdog97 8y ago
On the upside for Swedes, routing between europe-north1 and Stockholm seems good. Typically around 10 ms for a roundtrip.

oskari 8y ago

We've just added GCP Finland to our Aiven database service so you can have managed Kafka, Cassandra, PostgreSQL etc clusters up and running in a few minutes in the new region https://aiven.io/blog/google-cloud-now-over-finland/ https://aiven.io/blog/google-cloud-now-over-finland/

ksbuzzell 8y ago

Aiven.io engineers were able to offer the region one day after its release, marking their 71st region.