The Future of Google’s Data Centers
Google decided last year that 2016 would be a time to dedicate itself to moving into the data center and cloud computing arena. While Amazon Web Services is still the biggest player in the cloud, Google hiring Diane Greene, founder of VMware, shows that they are ready to take them on as a real challenger.
Google has also committed to expanding its data center count by 10, as it announced in a recent earnings call during the first quarter of 2016. This expansion is set to be global, giving the tech giant a much larger share of the current cloud computing market.
One of Google’s other big focuses has been machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence. Recently Joseph Kava, one of the Vice Presidents at the company, spoke extensively about the new cloud service initiative and how it will mesh with its other programs, especially machine learning.
They feel as if the initiative doesn’t really change where the company is going with its AI programs. The company has been offering the machine learning services through its cloud computing to companies for awhile now, and they feel that the expansion is just offering more opportunity to access an existing product. They also feel that while yes, it will become an expanded part of their business, the infrastructure is already firmly in place to handle the excess in data demands.
Google has been running the Android services for years, meaning they already have plenty of experience running as huge infrastructure with many different data entry points. There are billions of Android smartphones currently being used by customers all over the planet, so expanding on that for them is simply a change in scale and not a shift in how they do business or how they design their infrastructure.
One thing that is going to be different for the company is its expansion into new territories. One of the newly announced data centers will be located in Japan, somewhere they have not had a major presence before. Granted, Google has some ongoing relationships with their products in the country, but the offering of cloud services is a new venture. This forces the company to not only modify existing relationships, but to forge ahead with new customers that might not be familiar with the inner workings of the tech giant.
