IBM Announces Major Expansion of Regional Cloud Services

Clients also will be able to deploy multizone Kubernetes clusters across the availability zones via the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. BM, which hardly wants to see AWS continue to control 35 percent of the cloud services market and fast-growing Microsoft Azure surpass the 10 percent mark, has announced a major expansion of its own cloud capabilities. IBM, which has invested north of $3 billion in its cloud business, is planning to launch 18 new availability zones for the IBM Cloud across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The new availability zones are located in high demand centers in Europe (Germany and UK), Asia-Pacific (Tokyo and Sydney), and North America (Washington, DC and Dallas, Texas). They will come online in either IBM owned-and-operated data centers or in colocated centers throughout the summer and into the fall. IBM currently owns about 7 percent of the world cloud services market, ranking behind Azure at about 10 percent and ahead of Google (about 5 percent), depending upon which analyst you prefer. What's an Availability Zone? An availability zone is an isolated instance of cloud inside a data center region, with independent power, cooling and networking to strengthen fault tolerance. While IBM Cloud already operates in nearly 60 locations, it now has additional storage capacity and compute capability in these key centers.