WHAT’S BEHIND AMAZON, MICROSOFT AND GOOGLE’S AGGRESSIVE CLOUD EXPANSIONS

It wasn’t long ago that the big spectator sport in IaaS cloud computing was to watch a leading provider such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services announce price cuts and then ready for its rivals to follow suit.
The new game in town plays out in a similar way, except now the vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centers and cloud computing regions.
Throughout the month of October, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have all announced plans to build out new regions for their Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud operations. AWS brought a new region online in Ohio and announced plans to open one in France; Microsoft also announced plans for two new regions in France and new government regions in Arizona and Texas. Google aired big plans to add, on average, a new region per month to its cloud in 2017.
The regions will add to an already impressive roster around the globe for each vendor. Amazon Web Services boasts 14 regions that include a total of 38 Availability Zones, and AWS has plans for four more regions. (Each AWS region is made up of at least two Availability Zones (AZ) for fail over protection; each AZ has at least one data center). Microsoft doesn’t use an AZ approach but instead has 30 regions for its cloud, with eight more planned. Google has five regions with announced plans for nine more.