Understanding regions and zones

When we use Google Cloud to deploy our code using any of the different options that we already discussed in earlier chapters, one of the most important decisions to make is where to deploy and run our workloads.

Compute Engine resources, such as virtual machines or containers, are available in data centers located in many different countries. Google Cloud organizes these resources geographically using regions and zones.

A region is just a geographical location that we can choose to host our cloud resources. Three examples would be us-west-1, asia-northeast-2, and europe-west-3. As you can see, the first part of a region includes the continent, followed by the area, and ends with a number that identifies the region.

Each region contains three or more zones, which are deployment areas for our cloud resources. Zones in each region are interconnected with low latency and high bandwidth.

For example, one of the previously mentioned regions, asia...