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