Google Cloud Global Infrastructure Cheat Sheet

The cloud infrastructure of GCP is built around:

• 20+ regions
• 70+ zones
• 140+ network edge locations

Multi-regions

• A large geographic area, such as the United States, that contains two or more geographic places.

Regions

• Are collections of zones that provide high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region.

• Regional resources can be used by any resource in that region, regardless of zone.

• Generally, communication within regions will always be cost-efficient and faster than communication across different regions.

Zones

• It is an isolated location within a region and is composed of several physical infrastructures housed in a data center called cluster.
• Resources that live in a zone such as virtual machines or persistent disks are referred to as zonal resources.
• Zonal resources can only be used by other resources in the same zone.
• The fully-qualified name for a zone is made up of <region>-<zone>.
  • For example, for zone a in region us-central1, the zone name would be us-central1-a.
• Depending on how widely you want to distribute your application resources, you can provision them across multiple zones in multiple regions for redundancy.

Cluster

• It is a distinct physical infrastructure that is housed in a data center.

Network edge locations

• Offers connection to Google Cloud services from different locations across metropolitan areas.

View the interactive Google Cloud Platform map here.

Google Cloud Global Infrastructure Cheat Sheet References:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones
https://cloud.withgoogle.com/infrastructure
https://cloud.google.com/about/locations