Google Cloud runs on Google’s own global
network. It’s the largest network of its kind, and
Google has invested billions of dollars over many years to build it. This network is designed to give customers
the highest possible throughput and lowest possible latencies for their applications
by leveraging more than 100 content caching nodes worldwide. These are locations where high demand content
is cached for quicker access, allowing applications to respond to user requests from the location
that will provide the quickest response time. Google Cloud’s locations underpin all of
the important work we do for our customers. From redundant cloud regions to high-bandwidth
connectivity via subsea cables, every aspect of our infrastructure is designed to deliver
your services to your users, no matter where they are around the world. Google Cloud’s infrastructure is based in
five major geographic locations: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Having multiple service locations is important
because choosing where to locate applications affects qualities like availability, durability,
and latency, the latter of which measures the time a packet
of information takes to travel from its source to its destination. Each of these locations is divided into several
different regions and zones. Regions represent independent geographic areas
and are composed of zones. For example, London, or europe-west2, is a
region that currently comprises three different zones. A zone is an area where Google Cloud resources
are deployed. For example, if you launch a virtual machine
using Compute Engine, it will run in the zone that you specify to ensure resource redundancy. You can also run resources in different regions. This is useful for bringing applications closer
to users around the world and also for protection in case there are issues with an entire region,
such as a natural disaster. Some of Google Cloud’s services support
placing resources in what we call a multi-region. For example, Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations
allow you to replicate the database's data not just in multiple zones, but in multiple
zones across multiple regions, as defined by the instance configuration. These additional replicas enable you to read
data with low latency from multiple locations close to or within the regions in the configuration,
like The Netherlands and Belgium. Google Cloud currently supports 118 zones
in 39 regions, although this number is increasing all the time. You can find the most up-to-date numbers at
cloud.google.com/about/locations.