8 Tips for Selecting GCP Regions for Better Performance

Building an amazing product and actually delivering it to end users are two different challenges. Imagine spending countless sprints perfecting your application, only to find that some users can’t access it when it’s time to launch. Receiving complaints from prospective customers who cannot access your application can damage your business.

Ensuring maximum uptime and availability across different geographical locations can significantly increase revenue and expand your user base due to your application’s reliability. 

AWS, Azure, and GCP dominate the cloud ecosystem, holding a combined 66% market share, with GCP alone accounting for 11%. However, even with a reliable cloud provider, you can still face downtime if you don’t understand the concept of regions and how to select them.

While all major cloud providers offer global reach, GCP excels in specific areas that address the needs of modern businesses. For instance, startups and enterprises alike value GCP’s expertise in AI and Machine Learning, with cutting-edge tools like TensorFlow and Vertex AI that can give your applications a competitive edge.

One of GCP’s most powerful offerings is BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse that allows for powerful and scalable data analysis. BigQuery empowers businesses to extract insights from their ever-growing datasets quickly and efficiently, giving them a competitive advantage.

Now that we’ve explored some of GCP’s strengths, let’s dive into the topic of GCP regions and how to strategically select them to optimize performance for your global audience.

What are GCP regions?

A GCP region is a geographical location where resources and services are deployed. Each region consists of multiple isolated data centers, called zones, designed to ensure your application’s latency and availability.

GCP regions are spread across the globe in key areas to reduce latency, allowing you to deploy your application closer to end-users. For instance, if a large volume of traffic for your product comes from Europe, you’d deploy your application in a region that covers locations such as Belgium or the Netherlands. This way, end users can enjoy faster load times and a more responsive application experience.

GCP Regions vs. Zones

It’s important to note the difference between regions vs zones. A zone is a discrete data center operating within a region. Each GCP region hosts multiple zones independent of one another to prevent failures from impacting other zones within the same region.

A GCP region contains three or more zones, enabling you to distribute your applications across multiple zones within a region. This setup ensures that even if one zone experiences an outage, your application can continue to run seamlessly by relying on the other zones in the same region.

List of GCP Regions

At the time of writing, there are forty GCP regions and 121 zones in over 200 countries. You can check the official GCP documentation for a complete list of GCP regions. Below is a table containing some of these regions, their zones, and their locations.

GCP Region vs. Multi-region Architecture

We’ve been discussing a scenario in which your application would be deployed to a single data center (zone) in a particular region – but, in reality, that’s not practical. This is because you might gain more users from various parts of the world, like the UK or the US. Having your application deployed somewhere like us-central1 alone would mean that users in other locations have higher latency, which negatively impacts user experience and their satisfaction with your business.

Additionally, since data centers are physical locations, they are prone to natural disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. 

One way to combat these problems is by using a multi-region architecture, enabled by providers like Control Plane. In this architecture, your application is deployed across multiple zones in multiple regions. With the Control Plane platform, engineers can create an unlimited number of Global Virtual Clouds® (GVC™), effectively deploying applications across one or multiple regions (and multiple clouds) for better availability and lower latency. 

Benefits of Multi-region Application Architectures

No Single Point of Failure

The maintenance of a secure data center is often out of your hands. But with a multi-region architecture, if a natural disaster occurs in one of your regions, your users won’t be left in the dark. Thanks to the availability of other regions, your application will keep running and be available, which in turn leads to happy customers.

Reduced Latency

Having your product deployed in a single region in North California means users in Tokyo will have to wait longer when they send the request – and wait some more for the response. A multi-region application architecture helps avoid this long trip and optimizes latency. 

Higher Scalability

When your product becomes popular in Europe, a multi-region architecture allows you to increase resources in that region for seamless service. Once the initial demand subsides, you can scale down resources to optimize cloud costs while maintaining accessibility.

8 Tips for Selecting GCP Regions for Better Performance

There are some things you must look out for when selecting GCP regions. Here are eight tips to help you make a great choice.

1. Understand Your User Base

Your product’s performance is heavily influenced by your users’ geographical location relative to the GCP region hosting your services. Lower latency equals satisfied customers.

Identify where the majority of your users are located. Choose a region that is geographically closer to these users to minimize latency. For instance, if a large volume of your users is in Europe, opting for a region like europe-west1 (Belgium) is an excellent choice for better latency.

2. Evaluate Available Service

In GCP, not all regions offer the same services and machine types. When selecting a region, ensure it supports the services you need for your product. Check the GCP region availability to ensure your required services and machine types are available in the region you’re considering. This step is particularly important for services like AI/ML tools, managed databases, and other specialized offerings.

3. Consider Compliance and Data Residency Requirements

Different regions are subject to varying legal requirements regarding data storage and processing. Non-compliance can result in significant legal issues and fines. For instance, the European Union’s GDPR mandates strict data protection and privacy standards for any company handling EU residents’ data.

If your product operates in regulated industries like finance or healthcare, you must choose a region that complies with these regulations. Carefully review the regulatory landscape of your target markets and choose GCP regions that ensure compliance to avoid legal pitfalls and build trust with your users.

4. Go For Regions With Lower Carbon Footprint

Google powers each GCP region with electricity from the local grid, and the region’s carbon footprint depends on the type of electricity produced by that grid. Regions powered by renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, or hydroelectric power, have a lower carbon footprint.

If sustainability is a priority for your company, consider choosing regions powered by renewable energy. GCP provides information on the carbon footprint of its regions to help you make environmentally conscious decisions.

5. Plan For Disaster Recovery

As earlier emphasized, for higher product availability, you need to use a multi-region architecture. This approach ensures redundancy in the event of a disaster and that your users can still access your product.

Choose primary and secondary regions that are geographically separated to minimize the risk of correlated failures. For instance, pairing us-central1 (Iowa) with us-west1 (Oregon) can provide robust disaster recovery options.

6. Analyze Cost Implications

For resources in GCP, pricing isn’t always constant across regions. These costs can vary due to factors like demand, resource availability, and local pricing policies.

For this, you can use the GCP Pricing Calculator to estimate costs for different regions. Balance cost considerations with performance and software compliance needs.

Alternatively, you can calculate the cost of using an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) like Control Plane for a multi-region architecture using the handy K8s calculator tool. If you have a Kubernetes cluster, you can use our K8s cost savings calculator to calculate the cost savings when running workloads on the Control Plane platform vs running them on your cloud provider. With Control Plane’s intelligent cost optimization features, you only pay for usage, not overprovisioning, meaning you can reduce cloud costs by 60-80% – with no vendor lock-in.

7. Review Regional Quotas and Limits

Each region has specific quotas and limits for resources such as compute instances, storage, and network bandwidth.

Check the GCP quotas page to ensure the region can support your scaling needs. If you anticipate high demand, ensure that the chosen region has adequate quotas or can be easily increased.

8. Consider Future Expansion Plans

As your startup grows and gains more customers, you’ll need more resources. Plus, your infrastructure needs might expand to new geographical areas.

With this in mind, selecting a primary region that allows easy expansion to other regions is essential. GCP’s multi-region capabilities can facilitate scaling to new markets without significant reconfiguration. 

Low Latency Performance Equals Better Product

Choosing the right GCP region is a strategic decision that can affect your startup’s performance, compliance, cost, and scalability. By considering factors like your user base, compliance requirements, and future expansion, you can make an informed choice that aligns with your startup’s goals and growth plans.

Control Plane enables multi-cloud and multi-region setup quickly and easily with seamless developer self-service. Its distinctive approach allows you to mix and match cloud providers using only the services you need from each provider. 

When using Control Plane, engineers can create an unlimited number of Global Virtual Clouds® (GVC™). A GVC™ is simply a named collection of locations within one or multiple cloud regions and even on-prem environments. With Control Plane, your workloads run agnostically across any combination of geographic regions on GCP, plus AWS, Azure, or any other public/private cloud. 

The complimentary Universal Cloud Identity™ technology allows workloads to leverage services across any cloud provider, enabling optimal placement and configuration of microservices to minimize latency, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Get started for free, or book a demo today to discover how Control Plane helps you achieve low latency and simplify multi-region application deployment.