Bucket Locations

This page explains the concept of bucket location and the different locations where you can create buckets.

Key concepts

You specify a location for storing your object data when you create a bucket. There are different location types:
- A regional location is a specific geographic place, such as London.
- A multi-regional location is a large geographic area, such as the United States, that contains at least two geographic places.
  - A dual-regional location^Beta is a special type of multi-regional location that consists of two specific regional locations.
Objects stored in a multi-regional location are geo-redundant.
Some storage classes can only be used in a certain type of location.
- You must store Regional Storage object data in a regional location, such as us-east1.
- You must store Multi-Regional Storage object data in a multi-regional location (which includes dual-regional locations) such as eu.
- You can store Nearline Storage and Coldline Storage object data in any location.
Cloud Storage stores object data in the selected location in accordance with the Service Specific Terms.

A good location balances latency, availability, and bandwidth costs for data consumers.

Use a regional location to help optimize latency, availability, and network bandwidth for data consumers grouped in the same region.
- Store frequently accessed data, such as data used for analytics, as Regional Storage.
- Store data typically accessed less than once a month, such as archived data, as Nearline Storage.
- Store data typically accessed less than once a year, such as backup and disaster recovery data, as Coldline Storage.
Use a dual-regional location when you want similar performance advantages as regional locations but with added geo-redundancy.
Use a general multi-regional location when you want to serve content to data consumers that are outside of the Google network and distributed across large geographic areas, or when you need your data to be geo-redundant.
- Store frequently accessed data as Multi-Regional Storage.
- Store data typically accessed less than once a month as Nearline Storage.
- Store data typically accessed less than once a year as Coldline Storage.
If you're not sure which location type to use or have no scenario in mind, use a regional location that is convenient or contains the majority of the users of your data.

Storing data in the same region as your Compute Engine VM instances can provide better performance and lower network costs. These advantages apply to both regional and dual-regional locations.
While you can't specify a Compute Engine zone as a bucket location, all Compute Engine VM instances in zones within a certain regional location have similar performance when accessing buckets in that regional location.

The following sections list the Cloud Storage locations available for storing your data.

All regional locations are at least 100 miles apart.

Multi-Region Name	Multi-Region Description
`asia`	Data centers in Asia
`eu`	Data centers in the European Union¹
`us`	Data centers in the United States

¹ Object data added to a bucket in the eu multi-region is not stored in the europe-west2 data center.

Dual-Region Name	Dual-Region Description
`eur4`	`europe-north1` and `europe-west4`
`nam4`	`us-central1` and `us-east1`

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Last updated November 16, 2018.