Regions, Zones and the Global Network

Zonal, regional, multi-regional and global resources

Google Cloud runs in regions (such as asia-south1 in Mumbai and asia-south2 in Delhi), and each region has three or more zones (asia-south1-a, -b, -c): isolated failure domains with separate power and networking. A key idea in Google Cloud is the scope of each resource. A Compute Engine VM or persistent disk is zonal; a regional managed instance group, a Cloud Run service or a regional persistent disk is regional; Cloud Storage buckets can be dual-region or multi-region; and some resources are global, such as VPC networks, firewall rules, global load balancers and IAM policies. Traffic between regions travels on Google's private backbone rather than the public internet. When you choose a location, weigh user latency, data-residency rules, service and machine-type availability, and price, which varies by region.

Zones inside regions on one backbone

Regions contain zones; Google's backbone connects regions, and some resources span them all.

Exploring locations with gcloud

The gcloud CLI is the main command-line tool; it also sets defaults so you do not repeat --region everywhere.

gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project shop-dev-123456

gcloud compute regions list --format="value(name)"
gcloud compute zones list --filter="region:asia-south1"

# sensible defaults for this configuration
gcloud config set compute/region asia-south1
gcloud config set run/region asia-south1

Zonal means one zone can take you down

A single VM with a zonal disk does not survive a zone outage. For production, use regional managed instance groups, regional disks or regional services such as Cloud Run and Cloud SQL high availability.

त्वरित जाँच: Which of these is a global resource in Google Cloud?

• A VPC network
• A Compute Engine VM
• A zonal persistent disk
• A single zone