GCP Global Infrastructure

Google Cloud had been designed to serve all users worldwide by designing the infrastructure with redundant regions connected with high bandwidth connecting different continents.
Invested 13 Subsea Cables Connecting these continents(100,000 miles of fiber cable)

• 24 Regions
• 73 Zone
• 144 Network edges location
• 200+ countries and territory

In cloud computing, the terms zone, region, and multi-region are used to describe the geographical organization of cloud resources, which impacts performance, availability, and redundancy.

Zone:

A zone is a specific, isolated data center within a region. Each region contains multiple zones (usually 3 or more). Zones are independent of one another to ensure high availability.
Resources (like VMs, databases) within a zone can communicate with very low latency.
If a zone goes down (due to a failure or maintenance), other zones in the same region continue to operate.

• Key Points:
  • Zone = Individual data center within a region.
  • Isolated: Redundant setup ensures high availability.
  • Low latency communication between resources in the same zone.

Region:

A region is a geographical location that contains multiple zones (typically 3 or more). For example, us-central1 is a region.
A region ensures redundancy by spreading resources across multiple zones, reducing the risk of downtime due to failures in one zone.
Each region is designed to be independent of other regions to ensure fault tolerance and minimize latency for users in that geographical area.

• Key Points:
  • Region = Group of zones in a specific geographical area.
  • Ensures redundancy and low latency for local traffic.
  • Independent of other regions for fault tolerance.

Multi-region:

Multi-region refers to deploying resources across multiple regions. This approach is used to improve disaster recovery, global availability, and latency reduction for users in different parts of the world.
Services that need global reach or highly available systems may use multi-region setups to ensure that even if one region goes down, others can take over without downtime.
Examples include Google Cloud Storage or databases set up in a multi-region configuration.

• Key Points:
  • Multi-region = Resources spread across several regions.
  • Improves global availability and disaster recovery.
  • Reduces latency for users in different geographical areas.