What is the difference between a GCP region and a zone?

A region is a specific geographic location, such as europe-west1 in Belgium. A zone is an isolated deployment area inside a region, named as the region code plus a letter, like europe-west1-b. Spreading resources across zones protects against single-zone failures.

What are GCP multi-regions?

Multi-regions such as us, eu and asia are large geographic areas that span several regions on the same continent. Storage services like Cloud Storage and BigQuery can use a multi-region to replicate data across regions for higher availability and lower cross-region latency.

Why are some regions marked low CO2?

Google publishes a carbon-free energy percentage for each region. Regions flagged low CO2 here run on a high share of carbon-free energy, which lets you reduce the carbon footprint of your workloads by choosing them. These figures change over time.

How do I list available zones with gcloud?

Run gcloud compute zones list to see every zone your project can use, or gcloud compute regions list for regions. This reference is a quick offline lookup; the live CLI is authoritative for quotas and availability.

Does this tool fetch data from Google?

No. All region data is bundled into the page and searched locally in your browser. Nothing is sent to Google or any server.

What is the GCP Region & Zone Codes?

Searchable Google Cloud Platform region and zone reference with region code, physical location, continent, zone naming, multi-region membership and carbon-free energy status. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

GCP Region & Zone Codes

Name: GCP Region & Zone Codes
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Look up any Google Cloud region or zone

Google Cloud organises infrastructure into regions (geographic locations), zones (isolated areas inside a region), and multi-regions (continent-scale groupings for replicated storage). This reference maps every commercial GCP region code to its city, continent, zone naming and multi-region membership, with a search box and continent filter so you can find the right region or zone value fast.

How GCP regions and zones are structured

Each region has a code like europe-west1. Its zones are formed by appending a letter suffix — the Belgium region (europe-west1) exposes zones europe-west1-b, europe-west1-c, and europe-west1-d. When you create most resources you specify a region or a single zone:

gcloud compute instances create vm-1 \
  --zone=europe-west1-b \
  --machine-type=e2-standard-2

Storage services instead accept a location, which may be a single region (europe-west1) or a multi-region (eu, us, asia). Multi-regions replicate data across at least two regions on the same continent for higher availability and lower read latency to users spread across that geography.

Region naming conventions explained

GCP region codes follow a consistent pattern: {continent}-{direction}{number}. For example:

us-central1 — United States, central geography, first region in that area
europe-west4 — Europe, western geography, fourth region (Netherlands)
asia-southeast1 — Asia, southeastern geography, first region (Singapore)

Most regions have 3 zones (a, b, c) though some have 2 or 4. Zone letters are not guaranteed to be sequential — europe-west1 skips -a — so always verify available zones with gcloud compute zones list --filter="region:europe-west1" rather than assuming all three letters exist.

Choosing the right location type for your resource

Resource type	Use region	Use zone	Use multi-region
Compute Engine VM	—	Yes (pick a zone)	—
Cloud Storage bucket	Yes (lower cost)	—	Yes (for global apps or DR)
BigQuery dataset	Yes	—	Yes (`US`, `EU`)
Cloud SQL instance	Yes	—	—
GKE cluster	Yes (regional = 3-zone spread)	Yes (zonal = cheaper)	—
Firestore database	—	—	Yes (preferred for most apps)

Carbon-free energy and sustainability

Google publishes a Carbon Free Energy (CFE) percentage for each region, representing the average hourly share of carbon-free electricity consumed. Choosing a high-CFE region — such as europe-west1 (Belgium, historically around 50–60% CFE), europe-west4 (Netherlands), or us-central1 (Iowa, high wind energy) — reduces the Scope 2 emissions of your cloud workloads. The Low CO2 column in this reference follows Google’s published data, which changes as the grid mix changes — verify current figures in the Cloud Console under “Carbon Footprint”.

Quick tips

Search by city name (Belgium, Singapore) or by code fragment (west1) to find a region quickly.
The continent dropdown narrows the list if you are selecting from within a specific geography.
For GKE, prefer regional clusters (spread across 3 zones automatically) over zonal clusters unless cost is the primary constraint.
Always confirm zone availability for quota-limited machine types with gcloud compute machine-types list --zones=ZONE before designing for a specific zone.