Here is a post on GigaOm on 5 things your probably didn’t know about Google’s cloud. Here is one.

1. Google Compute Engine Zones are probably in Ireland and Oklahoma

In 2012 Google released impressive internal photos of their data center facilities and mapped them out. However, the Compute Engine Zones are very non-specific, e.g. “europe-west1-a”. Indeed, they have only two geographical regions (Europe West and US Central) compared to Amazon’s nine. In addition to its 13 locations, SoftLayer has announced 15 new data centers just for this year.

Google’s networking is very opaque. If you traceroute an Amazon or SoftLayer instance, you can see where traffic is going, the network providers, and usually the locations of the routers. In contrast, Google goes into its network at the closest POP, and everything else is very hidden.

It’s possible to guess where Google is locating its cloud. A test of a Google Compute Engine instance showed round trip responses within 20ms from London, UK. If we compare that to pings from London to the three European countries where Google has facilities — Ireland, Belgium and Finland — we can rule out Belgium and Finland because the ping round trip time is too high. Only the Ireland facility is close enough.

Google europe-west1-a Amazon eu-west (Ireland) Belgium
0.be.pool.ntp.org Finland
0.fi.pool.ntp.org

20ms

22ms

38ms

49ms

Disclosure: I work part-time for GigaOm Research.