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What kind of differences are there between different zones in the same region in Google Compute Engine?

For example, in Eastern Asia-Pacific, you can access to a set of different zones in Taipei Taoyuan. However, it shows the following:

  • asia-east1-a
  • asia-east1-b
  • asia-east1-c

What do these three zones do differently and how can you decide which zone to use on your project?

Blaszard
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2 Answers2

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Zones are an isolated location within a region (data-center). They are designed and setup to be independent of the other zones within a region so in the rare case that one zone goes down then the other zones should still function. The idea behind it is that you should spread your instances across the zones and create high-availability applications.

So in your case it doesn't matter in which zone you deploy your instance and you can use multiple zones/regions within one project

More info can be found here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones

Lennert Kuijpers
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  • Is it too bad to create a DB instance in one zone and the app server in another? – pinkpanther May 17 '20 at 12:21
  • @pinkpanther, creating your DB in one zone and app server in another would be pointless. The purpose of having a multi-zone infrastructure is in the event that one zone goes down, e.g. power loss. In your scenario if either zone went down your app would go down with it. – tmirks May 29 '20 at 13:43
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    Worth noting zones aren’t necessarily physically isolated. If an event were to take out a data centre with co-located zones you’d lose all zones. https://cloud.google.com/docs/geography-and-regions – Ari May 01 '23 at 20:22
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Despite the zones in the same region are very similar (to allow building robust, multi-zonal systems), there is one important difference that should be considered when choosing a zone for a project - Available features - available machine types, CPU platforms and other features might differ and do differ between the zones.

Example: At the time of writing this post, us-west1 region offers 3 zones,

  • us-west1-a: machine types: E2, N2, N1, M1; Other: GPUs available
  • us-west1-b: machine types: E2, N2, N1, M1, N2D, C2; Other: GPUs available, the only us-west1 zone offering AMD EPYC Rome platform
  • us-west1-c: machine types: E2, N2, N1; Other: does not offer GPUs

You can find all the details about available features in each zone in the official documentation https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones

Available zone features should thus be always checked when deciding on the region & zones best fitting the project requirements

sbocinec
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