In this video, you will learn about Google Cloud platforms physical geographic distribution. Regions are independent geographical area that consists of zones. A region is usually referred to by a continent, a cardinal direction, and a number. For example europe-west2 is a region in London. A zone is a single physical data center. Most regions have three or more zones to ensure redundancy. A regional resource like an external IP address is available to all the zones in a region and benefits from a higher degree of resiliency. A zone should be considered a single failure domain within a region. Google designs zones to be independent of each other. A zone has power, cooling, networking, and control planes that are isolated from one another which ensures a higher level of resiliency. Putting resources in different zones in a region provides isolation from most types of physical infrastructure and control plane failures. Putting resources in different regions provide an even higher degree of failure independence. This allows you to design robust systems with resources spread across different value domains. Because zones have high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to each other, you are free to create a higher resilience topography with minimal compromise on performance. An example of a zonal resource is compute engine virtual machine. In this example, we have three virtual machines. Two in Region A and one in Region B that all service end user traffic. This design ensures a higher level of resiliency because the failure domains are geographically spread. Remember that zones are a collection of data centers grouped together in a specific geographic area. Spreading your front-end virtual machines across different regions provides better resilience and also better coverage because Region B might be physically closer to your users and therefore might reduce latency. Google Cloud Platform services are globally distributed across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. These locations are divided into regions in zones. You can choose where to locate your application to meet your latency, availability, and durability requirements. Since you only pay for what you consume you have access to a globally distributed infrastructure without paying for the upfront investment. Google Cloud Platform resources are designed to leverage their geographical distribution to create resilient and scalable solution such as our global network. Google has built a large specialized data network to link all of its data centers together so that content can be replicated or traveled across multiple sites and services can be delivered closest to the end user. It is designed from the ground up to give customers high speed throughput and reliably low latency for their applications. The network infrastructure is composed of edge points of presence which are where Google's network connects to the rest of the internet. GCP can bring its traffic closer to its users because it operates an extensive global network of interconnected points. This reduces cost and provides users with a better experience. In this illustration, the blue line represents the private submarine fiber optic cables that connects all the resources across the globe.