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.

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.

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.

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

All regions 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 or EUROPE-WEST6 data center.

Dual-Region Name	Dual-Region Description
`EUR4`	`EUROPE-NORTH1` and `EUROPE-WEST4`. Additionally, object metadata may be stored in `EUROPE-WEST1`.
`NAM4`	`US-CENTRAL1` and `US-EAST1`. Additionally, object metadata may be stored in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Last updated January 3, 2020.