Bucket locations

This page explains the concept of bucket location and the different locations where you can create buckets. A bucket's location defines the physical place where object data in the bucket resides.

To learn how to set the location for your bucket, see Create buckets.

Key concepts

• You permanently set a geographic location for storing your object data when you create a bucket.

  • You cannot change a bucket's location after it's created, but you can move your data to a bucket in a different location.

• You can select from the following location types:

  • A region is a specific geographic place, such as São Paulo.

  • A dual-region is a specific pair of regions, such as Tokyo and Osaka.

    • Dual-region pairings can be predefined or configurable.

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

• The location type determines how your data is replicated and priced.

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

• The location information for a bucket is part of the bucket's metadata, which you can view if you have permission to do so.

Location considerations

When you choose the location for a Cloud Storage bucket, consider the differences in availability, and price, as shown in the following table.

	Region	Dual-region	Multi-region
Availability	Data redundancy across availability zones (synchronous) RTO(recovery time objective)=0: automated failover and failback on zonal failure (no need to change storage paths)	Higher availability than regions for a given storage class Data redundancy across regions (asynchronous) Turbo replication option for replication within 15 minutes RTO(recovery time objective)=0: automated failover and failback on regional failure (no need to change storage paths)	Higher availability than regions for a given storage class Data redundancy across regions (asynchronous) RTO(recovery time objective)=0: automated failover and failback on regional failure (no need to change storage paths)
Pricing	Lowest storage price No replication charges No outbound data transfer charges when reading data inside the same region	Highest storage price Replication charges apply on write No outbound data transfer charges when reading data within either region	Higher storage price than regions, but lower than dual-regions Replication charges apply on write Outbound data transfer charges always apply when reading data

Location recommendations

Requirements	Recommended bucket location	Workload examples
Optimized latency and bandwidth Lowest data storage cost Cross-zone redundancy	Region^1	Analytics Backup and archive
Optimized latency and bandwidth Cross-region redundancy, with precise control of the locations where copies of data are stored	Dual-region^2	Analytics Backup and archive Disaster recovery
Cross-geography data access Cross-region redundancy	Multi-region	Content serving

1. The Mexico, Montreal, and Osaka regions have three zones within one or two physical data centers. These regions are in the process of expanding to at least three physical data centers. For more information, see Cloud locations and Google Cloud Platform SLAs. To help improve the reliability of your workloads, consider a multi-regional deployment.
2. If you need a short and predictable recovery point objective (RPO), enable the premium turbo replication feature.

• To maximize performance and lower your total cost of ownership, co-locate your data and compute in the same region(s). Regions and dual-regions are both suitable for this purpose.
• To avoid data replication charges, store short-lived datasets in regions.

• For moderate performance and ad hoc analytics workloads, multi-region storage can be a cost-effective choice.

• 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

Geographic Area	Region Name	Region Description
North America
	NORTHAMERICA-NORTHEAST1 ^1	Montréal	Low CO2
	NORTHAMERICA-NORTHEAST2	Toronto	Low CO2
	NORTHAMERICA-SOUTH1 ^1	Querétaro
	US-CENTRAL1	Iowa	Low CO2
	US-EAST1	South Carolina
	US-EAST4	Northern Virginia
	US-EAST5	Columbus
	US-SOUTH1	Dallas	Low CO2
	US-WEST1	Oregon	Low CO2
	US-WEST2	Los Angeles
	US-WEST3	Salt Lake City
	US-WEST4	Las Vegas
South America
	SOUTHAMERICA-EAST1	São Paulo	Low CO2
	SOUTHAMERICA-WEST1	Santiago	Low CO2
Europe
	EUROPE-CENTRAL2	Warsaw
	EUROPE-NORTH1	Finland	Low CO2
	EUROPE-SOUTHWEST1	Madrid	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST1	Belgium	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST2	London	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST3	Frankfurt	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST4	Netherlands	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST6	Zürich	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST8	Milan
	EUROPE-WEST9	Paris	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST10	Berlin	Low CO2
	EUROPE-WEST12	Turin
Asia
	ASIA-EAST1	Taiwan
	ASIA-EAST2	Hong Kong
	ASIA-NORTHEAST1	Tokyo
	ASIA-NORTHEAST2 ^1	Osaka
	ASIA-NORTHEAST3	Seoul
	ASIA-SOUTHEAST1	Singapore
India
	ASIA-SOUTH1	Mumbai
	ASIA-SOUTH2	Delhi
Indonesia
	ASIA-SOUTHEAST2	Jakarta
Middle East
	ME-CENTRAL1	Doha
	ME-CENTRAL2	Dammam, Saudi Arabia
	ME-WEST1	Tel Aviv
Australia
	AUSTRALIA-SOUTHEAST1	Sydney
	AUSTRALIA-SOUTHEAST2	Melbourne
Africa
	AFRICA-SOUTH1	Johannesburg

¹Montréal, Osaka, and Querétaro each have three zones housed in one or two physical data centers. In the rare event of a disaster, data stored in these regions can be lost. To avoid this, you might want to consider using a dual-region or backing up business-critical data to a second region using Storage Transfer Service for increased data protection.

Dual-regions

Objects stored in dual-region buckets are replicated so that they are stored in each region that make up the dual-region. The time it takes an object to be replicated between the two regions is determined by the bucket's replication setting.

There are two types of dual-regions supported in Cloud Storage.

• A predefined dual-region is identified by a unique location code and represents two specific regions. For example, NAM4 is the location code for the predefined dual-region consisting of US-CENTRAL1 and US-EAST1.

• A configurable dual-region is identified by the location code of the geographical area in which the dual-region resides and a placement configuration in which you specify a pair of regions. For example, you could create a configurable dual-region that has a location code of EU and a placement configuration consisting of EU-CENTRAL2 and EU-WEST1.

If the regions you want to pair are not available as a dual-region, consider creating a separate bucket in each region and using Storage Transfer Service Event-driven transfers to keep the buckets in sync.

Configurable dual-regions

When creating a bucket in a configurable dual-region, the pair of regions that you use to make the dual-region must use the same location code. This code is set for the LOCATION of the bucket and is also the location you specify when using customer-managed encryption keys or the resource locations constraint with such dual-region buckets.

Note: Unlike buckets in other locations, which bill storage usage against the SKUs associated with their location code, buckets in configurable dual-regions bill storage usage against SKUs in both of their underlying regions.

The following regions are available when creating a configurable dual-region bucket:

Location code	Region Name	Region Description
ASIA
	ASIA-EAST1	Taiwan
	ASIA-SOUTHEAST1	Singapore
AU
	AUSTRALIA-SOUTHEAST1	Sydney
	AUSTRALIA-SOUTHEAST2	Melbourne
CA
	NORTHAMERICA-NORTHEAST1	Montréal
	NORTHAMERICA-NORTHEAST2	Toronto
EU
	EUROPE-CENTRAL2	Warsaw
	EUROPE-NORTH1^1	Finland
	EUROPE-SOUTHWEST1	Madrid
	EUROPE-WEST1	Belgium
	EUROPE-WEST3	Frankfurt
	EUROPE-WEST4^1	Netherlands
	EUROPE-WEST8	Milan
	EUROPE-WEST9	Paris
IN
	ASIA-SOUTH1	Mumbai
	ASIA-SOUTH2	Delhi
US
	US-CENTRAL1^2	Iowa
	US-EAST1 ^2	South Carolina
	US-EAST4	Northern Virginia
	US-EAST5^3	Columbus
	US-SOUTH1	Dallas
	US-WEST1	Oregon
	US-WEST2	Los Angeles
	US-WEST3	Salt Lake City
	US-WEST4	Las Vegas

¹The EUROPE-NORTH1 and EUROPE-WEST4 dual-region pairing is only available as a predefined dual-region.

²The US-CENTRAL1 and US-EAST1 dual-region pairing is only available as a predefined dual-region.

³US-EAST5 must be paired with either US-CENTRAL1 or US-EAST1.

Attempting to create a bucket using an invalid pairing, such as regions with different location codes, returns an error.

Predefined dual-regions

When creating a bucket in a predefined dual-region, you use a location code that uniquely identifies the pair of regions, in the same way you create buckets in regions and multi-regions. This location code is what you specify when using customer-managed encryption keys or the resource locations constraint with such dual-region buckets.

Note: Some tools present all dual-regions as if they were configurable dual-regions during bucket creation. For example, when creating a bucket in a dual-region using the Google Cloud console, you always select the individual regions that are part of the dual-region. If a predefined dual-region exists for that pair, that predefined dual-region is used. Otherwise, a configurable dual-region is created. Once created, the Google Cloud console displays the correct location for that bucket, making it clear if a predefined dual-region was created.

The following options are available when creating a bucket in a predefined dual-region:

Predefined dual-region name	Region Name	Region Description
ASIA1	ASIA-NORTHEAST1 + ASIA-NORTHEAST2	Tokyo + Osaka
EUR4	EUROPE-NORTH1 + EUROPE-WEST4	Finland + Netherlands
EUR5	EUROPE-WEST1 + EUROPE-WEST2	Belgium + London
EUR7	EUROPE-WEST2 + EUROPE-WEST3	London + Frankfurt
EUR8	EUROPE-WEST3 + EUROPE-WEST6	Frankfurt + Zürich
NAM4	US-CENTRAL1 + US-EAST1	Iowa + South Carolina

Multi-regions

Multi-Region Name	Multi-Region Description
ASIA	Data centers in Asia, excluding Hong Kong and Indonesia
EU	Data centers within member states of the European Union^*
US	Data centers in the United States

^* Object data added to a bucket in the EU multi-region is not stored in the EUROPE-WEST2 (London) or EUROPE-WEST6 (Zürich) regions.

What's next

• Create a bucket.
• Get the location for an existing bucket by viewing the bucket's metadata.
• Learn more about availability and durability in Cloud Storage.
• View all the Google Cloud services available in locations worldwide.
• Explore additional location-based concepts, such as zones, that apply to other Google Cloud services.

Try it for yourself

If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how Cloud Storage performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

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