Google is expanding its worldwide cloud footprint, adding new regions and 1,000 new salespeople. It also announced a rebranding that's got Twitter snickering.

Google launched eight new regions for Google Cloud -- Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt, with more to come next year. New data centers improve performance for customers -- a recent expansion to Oregon improved latency by 80%, Google said in a post on the Google Cloud Platform blog.

To improve reliability, Google is creating a new position, customer reliability engineer. Employees in that role will work with customers' operations teams to help them keep their cloud applications running smoothly. Google's reliability engineers helped Niantic launch Pokémon GO, Google said.

Google's expansion isn't limited to data centers -- it's hiring 1,000 people in cloud sales, the company said Thursday.

And it isn't just the new hires who'll need new business cards -- everybody in Google's cloud business unit will, as Google is rebranding, according to another Google blog post. The new "Google Cloud" brand now comprises all of Google's enterprise cloud business, including the Google Cloud Platform, machine learning tools and APIs, enterprise maps APIs, and Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks that access the cloud.

Visit Light Reading's Europe channel for more news and information for and about service providers on the Continent.

Also included in Google Cloud are the services formerly known as Google Apps -- the private version of Gmail, Google Docs and other collaboration tools which are now known as "G Suite." That name was the source of childish humor on Twitter which is by no means funny so wipe that smirk off your face right now.

As for technology: Google Kubernetes reached version 1.4 this week, and Google says it plans to update its Google Container Engine to the new version, which supports additional monitoring capabilities, one-click cluster spin-up, improved security and more.

And Google upgraded its analytics and machine learning, with improvements to Google BigQuery, its data warehouse, to support Standards SQL and improved compatibility with data tools. Google's Cloud Machine Learning is now available to all businesses.

Related posts:

— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud