Regions and Zones

Owned by Roger Cruz
Last updated: Feb 13, 2021
1 min read

Intro

My notes on GCP’s regions and zones

 

Tips and Tidbits

  • A region is a specific geographical location where you can host your resources.

  • Each region has one or more zones; most regions have three or more zones.

  • Zones have high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region.

  • Resources that live in a zone are referred to as zonal resources.

  • Other resources, like static external IP addresses, are regional.

  • Regional resources can be used by any resources in that region, regardless of zone, while zonal resources can only be used by other resources in the same zone.

  • Other resources, such as images, are global resources that can be used by any other resources across any location.

  •  All resources, whether global, zonal, or regional, must be unique within the project. That means every resource in Compute Engine must be uniquely named across the project

 

  • A cluster represents a distinct physical infrastructure that is housed in a data center.

  • Each cluster has independent software infrastructure, power, cooling, network, and security infrastructure, and includes a large pool of compute and storage resources.

  • Each zone is hosted in one or more clusters and Compute Engine independently maps zones to clusters for each organization

 

  • For a list of available zones and regions, including features available in that region's zones, go here.

 

  • Certain resources, such as static IPs, images, firewall rules, and VPC networks, have defined project-wide quota limits and per-region quota limits.

  • See quotas here.

Other Resources

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