Does locationId "europe-west" represent Belgium or the multi-region in the EU?

2
votes
  1. Create new project in Google Cloud Console

  2. Create a new entity in empty Cloud Datastore. When prompted for the location, choose europe-west, which according to Cloud Datastore Locations represents the multi-region of Europe.

    Reasoning:

    maximize the availability and durability of your database. Multi-region locations can withstand loss of entire regions and maintain availability without data loss. In the Cloud Datastore Service Level Agreement, multi-region locations define a higher monthly uptime percentage than regional locations.

  3. Next, create and deploy new Google App Engine (standard env) app into the same project.

    Cloud Datastore Locations also explains:

    The location setting for your Google Cloud Platform project applies to both Cloud Datastore and App Engine.

    App Engine is a regional resource, though.

For this project, the command

gcloud app describe

will return

locationId: europe-west

According to App Engine Locations, europe-west represents the Belgium region, while Cloud Datastore tells me europe-west is the multi-regional location in Europe. OTOH, Belgium isn't explicitly listed as a (regional) location of Cloud Datastore.

Question

Does locationId: europe-west refer to Belgium and Belgium is also the multi-regional location in Europe (for Cloud Datastore, but not for App Engine)?

Bonus Question

If the assumptions are correct: Does it mean that when the Belgium location is lost that clients could still access Cloud Datastore (as it is replicated to another region), but not the corresponding App Engine app?

2
google-app-enginegoogle-cloud-datastore

2 Answers

1
votes

For Cloud Datastore, europe-west refers to our Belgium-Finland-Netherlands multi-region (although this may change).

Yes, if the Belgium region is lost you will still be able to read/write from Cloud Datastore from other Cloud Regions - assuming you have a compute layer there.

1
votes

The long answer to your question is messy.

Here's the short answer: europe-west means different things based on the product. For App Engine, it means Belgium, and for datastore it means multi-region Europe (which does include Belgium, although strangely you cannot choose Belgium as a region otherwise - only London or Frankfurt).

Bonus answer: yes, though if your app is down I don't know how they'd be accessing Cloud Datastore.

Source: Google's table of products available by region.