[stingraycharles]

I don’t know what you’re trying to say with Borg cells, the point of discussion is not that the network etc are separated, but that they’re physically separated in such a way that these kind of flooding wouldn’t affect different AZs, and that GCP is cutting corners here.

Obviously every cloud vendor recommends replicating data between multiple regions, but fact of the matter is that a lot of cloud services work much easier with redundancy within a single region than multi-region redundancy.

[kyrra]

I guess it's different types of concerns. My feeling is that Google tries to optimize the resources of a datacenter, and the larger it is, the better things can scale. GCP Zones provide logical separation of machines for management (and network). There may be physical separation, but within a given region, GCP does not advertise this.

I think Google designs their datacenters for their own needs and expect you (a product running in their DCs) to distribute by region. Almost products at Google will be operating in multiple regions given the reach of most of our services, so DC design followed that need.

Based on GCP's docs, they still think region separate is better. Not sure why you wouldn't just do that?

If there is a catastrophic event (a large tornado hit AWS us-east-2), those buildings are pretty close to one another and both likely would be taken out, right? So you could lose multiple AZs since they are physically located so close to one another?