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 region is a specific geographic place, such as London.

    • A dual-region is a specific pair of regions, such as Finland and the Netherlands.

    • A multi-region is a large geographic area, such as the United States, that contains two or more geographic places.

  • Objects stored in a multi-region or dual-region are geo-redundant.

  • Cloud Storage stores object data in the selected location in accordance with the Service Specific Terms.

Location considerations

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

  • Use a region to help optimize latency and network bandwidth for data consumers, such as analytics pipelines, that are grouped in the same region.

  • Use a dual-region when you want similar performance advantages as regions, but also want the higher availability that comes with being geo-redundant.

  • Use a multi-region 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 want the higher availability that comes with being geo-redundant.

  • Generally, you should store your data in a location that is convenient or contains the majority of the users of your data.

  • See the data storage pricing table for storage costs in each location.

Compute Engine VM notes

  • Storing data in the same region as your Compute Engine VM instances can provide better performance. This advantage applies to both regions and dual-regions.
  • While you can't specify a Compute Engine zone as a bucket location, all Compute Engine VM instances in zones within a given region have similar performance when accessing buckets in that region.

Available locations

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

Regions

All regions are at least 100 miles apart.

Continent Region Name Region Description
North America
NORTHAMERICA-NORTHEAST1 Montréal
US-CENTRAL1 Iowa
US-EAST1 South Carolina
US-EAST4 Northern Virginia
US-WEST1 Oregon
US-WEST2 Los Angeles
South America
SOUTHAMERICA-EAST1 São Paulo
Europe
EUROPE-NORTH1 Finland
EUROPE-WEST1 Belgium
EUROPE-WEST2 London
EUROPE-WEST3 Frankfurt
EUROPE-WEST4 Netherlands
EUROPE-WEST6 Zürich
Asia
ASIA-EAST1 Taiwan
ASIA-EAST2 Hong Kong
ASIA-NORTHEAST1 Tokyo
ASIA-NORTHEAST2 Osaka
ASIA-NORTHEAST3 Seoul
ASIA-SOUTH1 Mumbai
ASIA-SOUTHEAST1 Singapore
Australia
AUSTRALIA-SOUTHEAST1 Sydney

Multi-regions

Multi-Region Name Multi-Region Description
ASIA Data centers in Asia
EU Data centers within member states of 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 (London) or EUROPE-WEST6 (Zurich) regions.

Dual-regions

Dual-Region Name Dual-Region Description
EUR4 EUROPE-NORTH1 and EUROPE-WEST4.
NAM4 US-CENTRAL1 and US-EAST1.

Alpha locations

  • us-central2— Central United States

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