Gcore Cloud: detailed overview of core and edge locations

Locations available in the regions that are most important to your business are one of the crucial factors to consider when choosing cloud solutions for your company. Points of presence must be located closely to your users in order to minimize the ping rate when sending requests to the server.

Apart from the geographical factor, you should also consider the location peculiarities.

In this article, we will tell you everything about Gcore Cloud points of presence including the regions and features available and the specifics of our edge and core locations.

Gcore Cloud points of presence

Our Cloud is available in 11 regions around the globe:

• Santa Clara and Manassas in the USA
• Amsterdam, Luxembourg, and Frankfurt in Europe
• Tokyo and Singapore in Asia

In the near future, we are going to launch points of presence in São Paulo (Brazil) and Sydney (Australia). Then, Gcore Cloud will have become available on all continents except Africa and Antarctica.

All our points of presence can be divided into core and edge locations. Our core locations are situated in Luxembourg, Manassas, and Singapore. All the other PoPs are classified as edge locations.

Difference between edge and core locations

Core locations are larger and have a higher capacity. They are meant for higher loads and allow easy infrastructure scaling. They can be used for core computing and operating high-volume websites.

All such locations are equipped with the most advanced machinery and have up to 1,000 cores and up to 5,000 TB RAM freely available.

Virtual machines and physical servers available in these locations cost more than the ones available in edge locations.

Edge locations have less capacity. They don’t allow fast infrastructure scaling and aren’t meant for core computing and operating high-volume websites.

These locations have up to 300 cores and up to 1 TB RAM freely available. They use combined ports for user traffic and data storage. This is why our storage services feature a 1 GB limit on the number of input and output operations.

However, their machines are cheaper than the ones situated in the core locations. This equipment is good for edge computing and for the projects that don’t require high computer performance.

Services available in different points of presence

Both edge and core locations feature all services provided by our Cloud:

• Virtual machines and bare metal (physical) servers
• Disaster recovery of data
• AI platform that speeds up machine learning and makes it cheaper
• Load balancer distributing traffic among the machines
• App and service marketplace for the development of your project
• The opportunity to create private cloud networks for computing and for app isolation
• Managing the whole infrastructure via API and Terraform

Bare metal servers aren’t available in Almaty yet. But in the near future, they will become available in this location as well.

Why we are constantly expanding our Cloud geography

A large number of PoPs not only allows our clients to become closer to the end users and reduce delays but also helps increase app fault tolerance.

You can enable virtual machines in the neighboring locations and distribute the load among them. This will enhance the reliability of your infrastructure. In case of a failure, you can redirect your traffic to another location. This is why we are opening points of presence not only in the new regions but also in the regions where we have already launched our nodes.

If you want to reduce user delays to a minimum and enhance the fault tolerance of your web services, you can use Gcore CDN together with our Cloud.

Using our CDN will allow you to distribute your traffic evenly among different machines and locations and deliver your content at an average speed of 30 ms to any region of the world.

How our Cloud helps your business grow faster and cheaper

Just like any other cloud, Gcore Cloud allows you:

• to cut your budget (you pay only for the resources actually consumed);
• to scale your resources easily (enabling new machines needs just a few clicks, and they become available in a couple of minutes);
• to reduce your IT team’s load (every cloud company provides equipment services).

We guarantee high computing performance and provide the services that help you speed up development and marketing of your new products.

As mentioned above, we possess an AI platform that speeds up machine learning and an app template marketplace. Our Cloud can be integrated with the CDN.

You can also enable the following options:

• Streaming Platform for online broadcasting and video delivery on request
• DDoS Protection at the network, transport, and application layers
• object Storage

All these features will be available together with the Cloud and can be managed using a convenient integrated operation panel.

All your data stored in Gcore Cloud will be protected securely. Our Cloud has a valid PCI DSS certificate. If you need a more sophisticated protection, you can also enable a virtual machine that supports Intel SGX.

Or prices are lower than the prices offered by many of our competitors.

Conclusions

1. Gcore Cloud has launched 11 points of presence: 3 core locations (Luxembourg, Manassas, and Singapore) and 7 edge locations (Santa Clara, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, Almaty, Khabarovsk, and Tokyo).
2. Core locations have a higher capacity and are meant for complex computing and operating high-volume websites.
3. Edge locations have a lower capacity. They are not meant for high infrastructure scaling and are suitable for the projects that don’t require high computer performance. However, the machines used in such locations are cheaper.
4. Both edge and core locations offer all our cloud services. You can enable virtual machines and physical servers, use the AI platform and app templates from our marketplace to speed up product development, distribute the load evenly among the machines, and make snapshots for the disaster recovery of your data.
5. We continue to open new points of presence on a regular basis because we want to make our clients closer to their end users. We help them deliver their content faster, distribute the load among different locations, and increase the fault tolerance of their infrastructure.
6. Our Cloud will help your business grow faster and cheaper. Together with the Cloud, you can enable other services and manage all products in a convenient integrated operation panel.

Select a location and build a virtual machine using our custom configuration service or schedule a free consultation with our specialists to get our expert recommendations on what suits your project best.

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