Google adds new Cloud region in Poland

Google on Friday announced a new Cloud region in Warsaw, Poland that will serve Poland and  broader Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Poland, which is experiencing rapid economic growth, has become an international software engineering hub, Google noted. It’s also a key US ally in the CEE region. 

The new Cloud region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions and will launch with a portfolio of key Google products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery. Customers in the region should benefit from lower latency and higher performance. 

Currently, Google has 20 cloud regions globally and 61 availability zones.

Google on Friday also announced it’s partnering with Poland’s Domestic Cloud Provider (DCP), which was founded jointly by PKO Bank Polski and the Polish Development Fund. DCP will serve a reseller of Google Cloud services in Poland and provide Google Cloud managed services capabilities.  

“Together, our goal is to accelerate cloud adoption by large and small businesses alike, across all industries,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post. “Over the next five years we’ll train experts to help Polish businesses onboard to the cloud, as well as provide insights and strategic advice on how companies can maximize the benefits of their cloud deployments.”

Earlier this year, Google announced a commitment of $20 million for digital skills programs across the CEE region. The company also has an R&D engineering center in Warsaw.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Poland signed an agreement with the US to strengthen cooperation on 5G technology — a move that could challenge Chinese giant Huawei’s growing influence over Europe’s mobile infrastructure. The agreement is part of a broader strategy on Poland’s part, Bojan Stojkovski wrote for ZDNet, to align more closely with the US and gain better access to US technologies.