Here's how GCP is organized. Let's start at the finest grain level, the Zone, shown here on the right. A zone is a deployment area for Google Cloud Platform Resources. For example, when you launch a virtual machine in GCP using Compute Engine, which we'll discuss later, it runs in a zone you specify. Although people think of a zone as being like a GCP Data Center, that's not strictly accurate because a zone doesn't always correspond to a single physical building. You can still visualize the zone that way, though. Zones are grouped into regions, independent geographic areas, and you can choose what regions your GCP resources are in. All the zones within a region have fast network connectivity among them. Locations within regions usually have round trip network latencies of under five milliseconds. Think of a zone as a single failure domain within a region. As part of building a fault tolerant application, you can spread their resources across multiple zones in a region. That helps protect against unexpected failures. You can run resources in different regions too. Lots of GCP customers do that, both to bring their applications closer to users around the world, and also to protect against the loss of an entire region, say, due to a natural disaster. A few Google Cloud Platform Services support placing resources in what we call a Multi-Region. For example, Google Cloud Storage, which we'll discuss later, lets you place data within the Europe Multi-Region. That means, it's stored redundantly in at least two geographic locations, separated by at least 160 kilometers within Europe. As of the time of this video's production, GCP had 15 regions. Visit cloud.google.com to see what the total is up to today.