Google Cloud offers services worldwide at locations across 200+ countries and territories, and it’s up to you to pick which of the Google Cloud Regions and Zones your applications will live in.
When it comes to Google Cloud resources and services, they can either be zonal, regional, or managed by Google across different regions. So, here’s what you need to know about these geographic locations along with some tips to help you pick the right one for you.
Google Cloud Regions
In Google Cloud, regions are independent geographic areas made up of one or more zones where users can host their resources. There are currently 36 regions around the world, scattered across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Since regions are independent geographic areas, spreading your resources and applications across different regions and zones provides isolation from different kinds of resources, applications, hardware, software, and infrastructure failures. This provides an even higher level of failure independence meaning the failure of one resource will not affect other resources in different regions and zones.
Regional Resources
Within a region, you will find regional resources that are redundantly deployed across multiple zones within an area which gives them higher availability in comparison to zonal resources.
At a minimum, all regions will offer the following products at launch: Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, Virtual Private Cloud, Key Management System, Cloud Identity, and Secret Manager.
Zones in Google Cloud
Zones are isolated locations in a region, deployment areas for your resources in a region and are considered as a single failure domain within a region. To deploy fault-tolerant applications with high availability and help protect against unexpected failures, deploy your applications across multiple zones in a region. Around the world, there are currently 109 zones.
Zones have high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region. As a best practice, Google suggests deploying applications across numerous zones and multiple regions so users can deploy high-availability, fault-tolerant applications. This is a key step as it helps protect against unexpected failures of components.
Zonal Resources
Zonal resources operate within a single zone. Zonal outages can affect some or all of the resources in that zone, in other words, if a zone becomes unavailable, all zonal resources in that zone are unavailable until service is restored. An example of a zonal resource is a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instance that resides within a specific zone.
Network Edge Locations
Network edge locations provide connectivity to Google’s network from the internet via peering such as 3rd parties. As of today, there are 176 network edge locations.
- Zonal resources operate in a single zone and can be affected by zonal outages such as a virtual machine.
- Regional resources span multiple zones for redundancy similar to a static IP address.
- Multi-regional supports redundancy across various regions in case of a single region failure.
Things To Remember When Selecting a Region or Zone
Now that we know what regions and zones are, here are some things to be aware of when you are selecting which region or zone would be the best fit for your infrastructure.
Distance: Choose zones based on the location of your customers and where the data is supposed to live. Store resources in zones that are closer to your point of service in order to keep network latency low.
Communication: It’s important to be mindful that communication across and within regions will incur different costs and happen at different speeds. Typically, communication within a region will be cheaper than communication across different regions.
Redundant Systems: As we mentioned above, Google is big on the fact that you should deploy fault-tolerant systems with high availability in case of unexpected failures. Therefore, you should design any important systems with redundancy across multiple regions and zones. This is to mitigate any possible effects if your instances were to experience an unexpected failure.
Resource Distribution: Zones are designed to be independent of one another so if one zone fails or becomes unavailable, you can transfer traffic to another zone in the same region to keep your services running.
Cost/Pricing: You should always check the pricing to compare the cost between regions.
Hope this article gives you a brief introduction to how to select the correct region & zone to deploy your services in a cost-efficient manner.
Related/References
- GCP Professional Cloud Architect: Everything You Need To Know
- Google Professional Cloud Architect: Step-By-Step Hands-On Guide
- Google Cloud Platform Console Walkthrough
- Google Cloud Functions
- Introduction To Google Cloud Platform
- Google Cloud Platform Certifications: All you need to know
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