New for Persistent Disk and Compute Engine: Control the storage location of your disk snapshots
Sophia Yang
Product Manager, Cloud Asset Inventory
Todd Gage
Product Manager for Persistent Disk
Google Compute Engine lets you create a snapshot for a persistent disk in order to provide point-in-time data protection for that disk. We’re pleased to let you know that you can now specify the storage location of your snapshots down to the regional level with the new snapshot feature in beta. You can specify snapshot locations at the regional or multi-regional level, which map to the Google Cloud Storage regional and multi-regional locations, for example, “us-central1” or “us”.
The ability to select a specific storage location for your snapshots provides you with a greater level of control over where your snapshots are stored. This is particularly helpful to meet data residency and business continuity requirements. Visit the pricing page to understand the cost of snapshot storage and network transit (Pricing is subject to change once the snapshot location feature is Generally Available (GA)).
Choosing your snapshot location with Compute Engine
To get started with this new feature, use the newly-added-storageLocation property in the disks.createSnapshot() beta API, or use the gcloud command example below:You can also control the storage location of snapshots when you create a new snapshot in the Developer Console, as pictured below.
Specifying a regional location can be especially helpful when you’re trying to meet regulatory and compliance requirements, like storing patient health records or customer financial data in a particular location. By choosing a multi-regional storage location, you benefit from data redundancy across multiple data centers that are separated by at least 100 miles. This provides the highest availability for your data, even in the event of large-scale disruptions.
Whether you choose a regional or multi-regional location, you can still access your snapshot as a globally addressable Compute Engine resource. This makes it easy to build cross-region systems, since you can reference your snapshots from any region.
Get started by trying out this new snapshot feature in the Developer Console, through gcloud or using the API. You can also check out the documentation to learn more details.
