We’re continuing to expand our global footprint — and we’re doing it rapidly. In 2020, we announced our plans to launch a new cloud region to help accelerate the economic recovery and growth of Spain. Today, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Madrid is officially open.

Designed to help meet the growing technology needs of Spanish businesses, the new Madrid region (europe-southwest1) provides low-latency, highly available cloud services with high international security and data protection standards — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. The new Madrid region joins our network of 33 regions throughout the globe, helping local Spanish businesses connect with users everywhere. You can join us at our region celebration on May 25 here.

A cloud built for Spain

Google Cloud’s global network of regions is the cornerstone of our cloud infrastructure, enabling us to deliver high-performance, low-latency, sustainable cloud-based services and products to support our customers across the globe.

Built in partnership with Telefónica, the new Madrid region offers Google Cloud’s unique global infrastructure locally, creating new opportunities for digital transformation across various industries and making it easier for organizations at any stage of their cloud journey to securely deliver faster, more reliable customer experiences.

Accelerating digital transformation also requires cloud services that meet regulatory compliance and digital governance requirements. In particular, highly regulated sectors like government, healthcare, and financial services need additional controls to store data and run workloads locally.

“We welcome the Cloud capabilities that the Google Cloud region is bringing to Spain. It is especially important for the alignment with the security levels that public sector organizations demand and as required in the National Security Scheme. They must take advantage of a cloud that is offered locally with the highest security guarantees. The collaboration with hyperscalers is key. It is also essential to continue advancing with best practices adoption, training, security configurations and supervision” Luis Jimenez, Subdirector del Centro Criptológico Nacional.

Having a new region in Madrid helps remove these barriers to cloud adoption, allowing both Spanish businesses and government entities to meet their availability, data residency, and sustainability needs in Spain while also accelerating their digital transformation.

The Madrid region is launching with three cloud zones to prevent service interruptions, and our standard set of products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, and Cloud Identity. . Customers will also get access to smarter analytics capabilities, AI and ML solutions, and application modernization tools that allow them to unleash the full potential of cloud computing.

At the same time, customers will benefit from controls that enable them to maintain the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, especially those that deal with specific data storage requirements.

“In DIA Group we have always been committed to seeking innovative solutions to improve our customers’ experience while respecting the trust they place on us every day. For this reason we have decided to rely on the new Google Cloud region in Madrid for some of our most critical workloads like our store operations (orders, inventory, product stock, etc). This will guarantee our customers a low-latency service while managing their data within the national borders, as well as optimized performance.” – Carlos Valero, Chief Information Officer, Grupo DIA

“Offering our customers low-latency services while keeping workloads and data management safe, is vital for us. The availability of the new Google Cloud region in Madrid represents a great step forward that will allow us to achieve our goals and meet the expectations of our customers by offering them a premium user experience without neglecting data security and residency.” – Carmen Lopez Herranz, CTO, BBVA

Going beyond with a transformation cloud

At Google Cloud, we’re constantly working to help customers across various industries achieve what was once considered impossible, reinvent themselves, and transform the way they serve their customers using digital technology — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry.

Our transformation cloud is helping businesses become:

Smarter: Google Cloud lets you leverage data for deeper insights with a unified platform that makes it easy to get value from structured or unstructured data, regardless of where it resides.
Open: Google Cloud’s commitment to multicloud, hybrid cloud, and open source provides the freedom to choose the right solutions, allowing developers to build and innovate faster, in any environment.
Connected: Digital transformation isn’t just about technology — it’s about people and culture. In an era where work can happen anywhere, Google Cloud provides the tools needed to be more innovative, productive, and make faster decisions, together.
Trusted: Google Cloud offers strong security capabilities and a zero-trust architecture to help protect data, applications, and infrastructure against potential threats. We also provide specific offerings and work closely with local partners to help address digital sovereignty requirements emerging from both customers and policymakers.

In addition to the launch of our new Madrid cloud region, we’re making other commitments that will pave the way for new business innovations and development in Spain. The Grace Hopper subsea cable landed in September 2021 in Bilbao, connecting Spain and the UK with the United States for increased performance and greater support using the same network that powers Google infrastructure and products.

We’re also helping people develop new skills that will enable society to champion cloud technology and growth in the future. Google has already helped to train more than 1 million people with our Grow with Google program in Spain, and we have future plans to open a center of excellence for cybersecurity in Malaga and support the creation of the AI Lab Granada, in collaboration with Indra Minsait in the coming years.

For more details about the Madrid region, head to our cloud locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions.

As the saying goes, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” Some organizations find it challenging to predict what cloud resources they’ll need in months or years ahead. Every organization is on its own unique cloud journey. To help, we’re developing new ways for customers to consume and pay for Google Cloud services. We’re doing this by removing barriers to entry, aligning cost to consumption and providing contractual and product flexibility. Read on to learn how we’re rolling out several new go-to-market programs across these key areas to help our customers purchase and consume Google Cloud services more easily.

Removing barriers to entry with Google Cloud Flex Agreements

Many customers choose multi-year commitments because they provide better line-of-sight into IT spend and budgeting. However, these commitments can create difficulty for those who don’t have clear visibility into their future cloud consumption needs. That’s why today we’re launching Flex Agreements, which enable customers to migrate their workloads to the cloud with no up-front commitments. As part of this new licensing option, Google Cloud customers still get access to unique incentives, such as monthly spend discounts¹, committed use discounts, cloud credits, and access to professional services, based on monthly spend and workloads migrated to Google Cloud.

Flex Agreements are just one example of how we are removing barriers to help customers start using Google Cloud. In 2022, we launched the Innovators Plus annual subscription, which gives developers a curated toolkit to accelerate their expertise, including access to live and on-demand training through Google Cloud Skills Boost, Google Cloud credits, and more. 

We also recently expanded trials for Google Cloud products. For example, the new Spanner free trial instance is good for 90 days, allowing developers to create Google Standard SQL or PostgreSQL databases, explore Spanner capabilities, and prototype applications—with no commitment or contract needed. 

Contractual and feature flexibility  

Contractual flexibility has always been one of our core principles. Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), for example, provide discounted prices in exchange for a commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified term. Last year, we introduced Flexible CUD, spend-based commitments that offer predictable and simple flat-rate discounts that apply across multiple virtual machine families and regions.

In addition to contractual flexibility, our customers also need the flexibility to choose features and functionality based on their stages of cloud adoption and the complexity of their business requirements. Therefore, over the next few quarters, we will launch new product pricing editions—Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus—in parts of our cloud portfolio. This new commercial packaging model will help give customers more choice and flexibility to optimize their cloud spend.

For customers running workloads such as those in regulated industries like banking and public sector, the higher-end Enterprise Plus tier will offer compute, storage, networking and analytics services with high availability, multi-region support, regional failover and disaster recovery, advanced security, and a broad range of regulatory compliance support. The Enterprise pricing tier will include a broad range of features designed for customers with workloads that demand a high level of scalability, flexibility, and reliability. The Standard pricing tier will offer cost-efficient and easy-to-use managed services that include all essential capabilities such as autoscaling to meet the core workload requirements of customers.

Align costs to consumption with autoscaling

At Google Cloud, a core requirement for the products we build is providing customers industry-leading capabilities to automatically scale (autoscale) services up and down to match capacity with real-time demand. Autoscaling improves uptime, reduces infrastructure costs, and removes the operational burden of managing resources.  

Many Google Cloud products include autoscaling capabilities to help customers manage unplanned variations in demand. For example, Dataflow vertical and horizontal autoscaling, in combination with granular adaptive resource configuration (aka “right-fitting”), has resulted in up to 50% saving in infrastructure costs for streaming by automatically choosing the right number of instances required to run the jobs and dynamically re-allocating more or fewer instances during the runtime of jobs. Bigtable also provides native autoscaling capabilities, and Spanner’s autoscale is an open source tool that works across regional and multi-regional Spanner deployments. 

Similarly, we added multiple features such as Cluster Autoscaler, Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, Vertical Pod Autoscaling, and Node Auto-Provisioning to GKE for elasticity and cost efficiency. 

For L.L.Bean, the ability to quickly scale capacity to meet changing usage patterns (e.g., during the holidays), as well as to rapidly perform load tests to test capacity, are “night and day” with Google Cloud compared to L.L.Bean’s legacy on-premises IT system.

“We won’t have to pay for peak capacity to have it available during peak shopping times. We just scale capacity up or down as needed.” — Randy Dyer, Enterprise Architect, L.L.Bean

We are now taking these capabilities to the next level by enabling autoscaling in BigQuery at a more granular level so you never pay more than what you use. This allows you to provision additional capacity in smaller increments, so you never overprovision and overpay for underutilized capacity. BigQuery customers can now try the new BigQuery autoscaler (currently in public preview) in their Google Cloud console.

A commitment to flexibility and choice

At Google Cloud, we remain deeply committed to the success of our customers and partners, and we are uniquely positioned to help organizations transform their business. By providing you with more flexibility and choice in how to purchase our products, we are empowering you to be more efficient and resilient.

Join Google Data Cloud & AI Summit to hear the latest announcements around innovations in Google Data Cloud for databases, data analytics, business intelligence, and AI. Gain expert insights, new solutions, and strategies that can help you transform customer experiences with modern apps, boost revenue, and reduce costs.

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