Google Cloud Platform has landed in Australia, with the official launch this morning of a Sydney region for the service.
At launch, the Sydney GCP region offers three zones and a range of compute, storage, networking and big data services.
In a blog entry announcing the launch, Google said App Engine and Datastore will be available shortly.
Australian GCP customers include PwC, Monash University, Fairfax Media and Woodside.
Google revealed in September that it intended to launch a Sydney region for its cloud platform, as part of a major geographical expansion of the service.
The company has previously said that it intends to launch around one region a month this year.
Including Sydney, Google has four Asia Pacific regions: Taiwan, Tokyo and Singapore (Singapore launched earlier this month).
Google said its performance testing showed an 80 to 95 per cent reduction in round-trip time latency for customers using services from the Sydney region from Australian and New Zealand cities, compared to using its Singapore and Taiwan GCP regions.
Amazon Web Services launched local data centres for its cloud services in late 2012. Microsoft launched Australian Azure data centres in 2014.