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In this article, you'll find recommendations and best practices focused on the topic of Geographic Zones and Regions, as part of the System Design Pillar of the Google Cloud Architecture Framework.
Throughout this article, we often refer to the geographic zones and regions documentation. We suggest you review this documentation to learn basic concepts before evaluating the following assessment questions and recommendations.
Region selection
In what geographical regions are your application users located? Do you plan to use any specific Google Cloud services?
Select a region or set of regions that are closest geographically to your end users. This will help minimize latency when serving traffic to external users, which has a direct impact on end-user experience and the cost related to serving them.
Select a region based on the available services that are required by your business. Most services are available across all regions. Certain enterprise-specific services might be available in a subset of regions with their initial release.
Regions have different cost rates for the same services. Compare pricing of the major resources planned to be used to derive a cost-efficient region. Cost considerations differ largely with resources used like compute, networking, or data storage, including backup requirements. See the Cost Optimization Pillar to learn more.
Deployment pattern
Have you evaluated various deployment considerations (e.g. single vs multi-region) based on your application needs?
While we encourage you to use deployment patterns suitable for your application, based on its business criticality, we recommend using multi-region design for your deployments. Multi-zonal deployments can also provide the desired resiliency in cases where multi-region deployments are limited due to cost or other considerations.
Global services like Cloud Load Balancing provide a single IP that is routed to your application. This helps improve the end-user experience when you’re serving a global audience. See the Reliability Pillar to learn more on designing reliable systems.
Regulations and compliance
Do you have any regulatory or compliance requirements based on geography?
Select a specific region or set of regions to meet any regulatory and/or compliance geographic requirements that dictate the use of certain geographies, such as GDPR or data residency.
See the Security Pillar for more information on designing secured systems.
Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 and is committed to be carbon-free by 2030. Use the Google Cloud Region Picker to select a region by its carbon footprint.
We've just covered Geographic Zones and Regions as part of the System Design Pillar of the Google Cloud Architecture Framework. There are several other topics within the System Design Pillar that may be of interest to you:
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