Regions, Zones & Indian Regions

By the end of this lesson you will be able to explain what a region and a zone are, name the two Google Cloud regions in India, and choose where to place a resource. You will also set a default region so you do not type it in every command.

Regions and zones in plain words

Indian Railways has zones such as Northern Railway and Western Railway. Each zone has many stations. If one station has a problem, trains still run through the others.

Google Cloud places its data centres in a similar way:

• A region is a geographic area, such as Mumbai. Its name looks like asia-south1.
• A zone is a separate deployment area inside a region, with its own power, cooling and network. Its name adds a letter: asia-south1-a.

Each region usually has three zones. Zones in one region are connected by fast, low-delay network links. If one zone fails, the others keep running. This is why careful engineers spread important servers across at least two zones.

The Indian regions

Google Cloud has two regions in India. These names were checked on the official regions page in November 2026:

AWS calls its Mumbai region ap-south-1 and Hyderabad ap-south-2. The similar names are a coincidence: always use the exact Google Cloud names in Google Cloud commands.

Users in Jaipur, Lucknow or Kochi will usually get the lowest delay from one of these two regions. Two regions in one country also help you plan disaster recovery while keeping data inside India. You will use this idea in Backups & Disaster Recovery.

Step by step: list zones and set defaults

Step 1. List the zones in the Mumbai region:

gcloud compute zones list --filter="region:asia-south1"

NAME           REGION       STATUS  NEXT_MAINTENANCE  TURNDOWN_DATE
asia-south1-a  asia-south1  UP
asia-south1-b  asia-south1  UP
asia-south1-c  asia-south1  UP

All three zones should show UP.

Step 2. Set a default region and zone for your gcloud configuration:

gcloud config set compute/region asia-south1
gcloud config set compute/zone asia-south1-a

Updated property [compute/region].
Updated property [compute/zone].

Step 3. From now on, commands that need a zone or region use these defaults unless you pass --zone or --region. For example, this command creates a small VM in asia-south1-a without naming the zone:

gcloud compute instances create test-vm --machine-type=e2-small \
  --image-family=debian-12 --image-project=debian-cloud

You will build real VMs in Compute Engine Virtual Machines.

Zonal, regional and global resources

Every resource has a scope: the area it lives in and survives in. This decides what happens when a zone or region has trouble.

A practical rule: a single VM in one zone is a single point of failure. A regional service, or several VMs in different zones behind a load balancer, keeps working if one zone fails.

How to choose a location

Ask these questions in order:

1. Where are my users? Pick a region close to them for low delay. For Indian users, start with asia-south1 or asia-south2.
2. Where must the data live? Some Indian rules and contracts require data to stay in India. See Data Residency & Compliance in India.
3. Is the service available there? Not every product or machine type exists in every region. Check the product's locations page.
4. What does it cost? Prices differ between regions. Compare on the official pricing pages instead of guessing.
5. Do I need a second region? For disaster recovery, keep a copy in another region, ideally the other Indian region if data must stay in India.

Some locations cannot be changed after creation. A Cloud Storage bucket's location and an App Engine app's region are fixed. Choose carefully the first time.

Network service tiers

Google Cloud offers two network service tiers for internet traffic:

• Premium Tier (the default): traffic enters and leaves Google's private network close to the user, then travels on Google's backbone. Usually faster and more reliable.
• Standard Tier: traffic travels more of the way over the public internet. It can cost less, but only works with regional resources.

For most learners, the default Premium Tier is the right choice.

Common mistakes

• Typing AWS names in GCP. ap-south-1 is AWS. Google Cloud uses asia-south1.
• Putting everything in one zone. A single-zone setup goes down with that zone. Use regional services or spread VMs across zones.
• Ignoring data residency. Choosing a US region by default can break Indian contractual or regulatory rules.
• Forgetting that some locations are permanent. Buckets and App Engine apps cannot move regions later.

Key points

• A region is a geographic area; a zone is an isolated area inside a region, usually three per region.
• India has asia-south1 (Mumbai) and asia-south2 (Delhi), each with zones -a, -b and -c.
• Resources are zonal, regional, multi-regional or global, and the scope decides how they survive failures.
• VPC networks are global, while subnets are regional.
• Choose a location by users, data rules, service availability and cost; some locations cannot change later.

gcloud config set compute/region asia-south1
gcloud config set compute/zone asia-south1-a