Google Inc., has upped the ante by adding two new compute zones for its Google Compute Engine as it bids for superiority over rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The world’s biggest ad firm has introduced new zones for its “US-Central1” and “Asia-East1” regions, in a move that’s primarily aimed at developers. Apparently, it will make it easier for devs to run Quorum-based systems like MongoDB that offer high availability by running across multiple data centers. The new zones will run servers powered by Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors, whereas its other U.S. zones use the older Sandy Bridge chips.

Google Compute Engine currently has three regions – Asia, Europe and the U.S. – of which only Europe has been left with two zones. Google still maintains six data centers in the U.S., three in Europe, two in Asia and one in South America, with the new zones made up by a partitioning of its existing centers.

Google product manager Scott Van Woudenberg wrote about the changes in a blog post, making much of the ability to run MongoDB with fewer errors. It does so thanks to its Quorum-based architecture, which allows nodes to detect failures and route around them to avoid downtime.

But Google is still trailing behind its biggest rival AWS, which offers three zones in the U.S. with multiple availability zones in each. AWS also has more data centers scattered around the place, with facilities in Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo and a new one being tested in Beijing.

To make up for this deficiency, Google has also been battling it out on price by slashing the cost of Compute Engine. But that might not be enough to tempt developers – for many of these, the ability to keep their code close to their customers is often worth paying for.

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