Choosing a Cloud Storage Location Type

Matching location type to application needs means choosing the smallest failure scope that still meets uptime goals and the closest placement that still meets speed goals. An application that must keep running through a regional outage needs cross-region redundancy, while an application that only needs to survive a zonal outage can use regional protection. An application with strict speed needs should place storage in the same zone or region as its compute, especially when products require it, such as a Compute Engine instance that can only attach a persistent disk in the same region.