This documentation is for the most recent version of GKE on Azure, released in November 2021. See the Release notes for more information.

Google Cloud management regions overview

Google Cloud management regions and locations

Clusters created with GKE on Azure are located in a Azure region. When you create a cluster, you specify both an Azure region for your cluster and a Google Cloud region that manages the cluster.

Each Google Cloud region can manage clusters in a specific set of nearby Azure regions. For example, the Google Cloud region us-east4, located in Oregon, manages clusters in the Azure regions canadacentral in Ontario, centralus in Iowa, eastus in Virginia, eastus2 in Virginia and southcentralus in Texas. Managing your clusters from nearby Google Cloud regions improves availability and reduces the latency of cluster management operations.

GKE on Azure includes the cluster's Google Cloud region in the cluster's resource name. For example, a cluster named my-cluster created in project my-project on region us-west1 has a resource name of projects/my-project/locations/us-west1/azureClusters/my-cluster. By contrast, the Azure region is part of the cluster resource. You can specify it in the azure_region field of API calls.

Data locality

To manage your clusters, the GKE Multi-Cloud API must store information about your cluster's state in the Google Cloud region you specified when creating the cluster. This data doesn't include workload-specific data (which is stored in your cluster's region) but does include information such as Azure resource IDs and public key infrastructure (PKI) data.

If your application needs to store its data in a particular geographic region, specify an Azure region and its associated Google Cloud management region that comply with your requirements when you create your clusters.

Google Cloud regions and nearby Azure regions

Google Cloud Region	Azure region
`asia-east2`	`eastasia`
`asia-northeast2`	`japaneast`
`asia-south1`	`centralindia`
`asia-southeast1`	`australiaeast` `japaneast` `southeastasia`
`australia-southeast1`	`australiaeast`
`europe-north1`	`northeurope` `norwayeast`
`europe-west1`	`francecentral` `germanywestcentral` `northeurope` `uksouth` `westeurope`
`europe-west2`	`uksouth`
`europe-west3`	`germanywestcentral`
`europe-west4`	`westeurope`
`europe-west6`	`switzerlandnorth`
`europe-west9`	`francecentral`
`northamerica-northeast1`	`canadacentral`
`southamerica-east1`	`brazilsouth`
`us-east4`	`canadacentral` `centralus` `eastus` `eastus2` `southcentralus`
`us-west1`	`westus2`

You can fetch the most up-to-date list of current Azure regions supported by a Google Cloud region by running the following gcloud command:

gcloud container azure get-server-config --location GOOGLE_CLOUD_REGION

Replace GOOGLE_CLOUD_REGION with the name of the Google Cloud region you're querying.