[bushbaba]

GCP has multiple zones in the same physical building. Not all cloud providers have distinct physical buildings for each Availability Zone.

[aeyes]

Do they have an official description what a zone is somewhere?

Back in the days when we had our own data centers a zone was defined as a "fire section" meaning that it should not be impacted if any other zone of the data center had a fire. This obviously means that you can't call 3 floors of a building a zone.

Edit: The information on this site https://cloud.google.com/docs/geography-and-regions#regions_... clearly states that a zone is "physically distinct" so they have some explaining to do.

Edit 2: Sneaky... They changed the status page to say "europe-west9" instead of "europe-west9-a".

[vdm]

I could not find the GCP equivalent to this from AWS:

"AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other."

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...

[bushbaba]

Physically distinct could refer to distinct hardware in the same building and cage space. It’s “physically distinct”. Google makes no promises that the zones are in different buildings or separated by N feet/miles of space.