Google Cloud opens its Las Vegas region

Google Cloud today announced the official opening of its Las Vegas data center region. With this, Google Cloud now operates four regions in the western U.S., with Las Vegas complementing Google Cloud's existing data centers in Los Angeles, Calif.; The Dalles, Ore. and its recently opened Salt Lake City, Utah region.

In total, Google now offers its customers the option to host their applications in 23 regions globally; with the opening of this new region, it now has seven U.S. regions.

Like all of Google's new regions, Las Vegas will offer three availability zones and access to most of Google Cloud's services. In Vegas, though, developers won't be able to use relatively new services like Cloud Functions and Cloud Run yet. Some other features, including Cloud HSM and Secret Manager, are also not available yet.

The company first announced the Vegas expansion in July 2019. And while it's eerily quiet in Las Vegas right now, the idea behind these new regions is always to give companies the option to be close to their customers and offer them low-latency access to their applications, as well as the ability to distribute workloads across a wider geographic region.

Earlier this year, Google also announced that it would open its regions in Jakarta, Seoul and Warsaw over the course of 2020. So far, it doesn't look like the COVID-19 pandemic is slowing down these plans.

For Las Vegas, Google's launch partner is Aristocrat, which fittingly offers digital products for the gambling industry.

"Cloud technologies enable two important outcomes for us," said James Alvarez, CIO of Aristocrat. "First the ability to securely, consistently and immediately enable and disable game development platforms; and second, our ability to expand and contract our infrastructure based on demand. Both of these capabilities allow us to flex our technology to fully support the demands of our customers and our business. The Las Vegas region gives us the opportunity to more directly engage Google Cloud services and take advantage of an entry point into the network."

Google Cloud announces four new regions as it expands its global footprint