Google Cloud Platform in Action

Chapter 3. The cloud data center

This chapter covers

• What data centers are and where they are
• Data center security and privacy
• Regions, zones, and disaster isolation

If you’ve ever paid for web hosting before, it’s likely that the computer running as your web host was physically located in a data center. As you learned in chapter 1, deploying in the cloud is similar to traditional hosting, so, as you’d expect, if you turn on a virtual machine in, or upload a file to, the cloud, your resources live inside a data center. But where are these data centers? Are they safe? Should you trust the employees who take care of them? Couldn’t someone steal your data or the source code to your killer app?

All of these questions are valid, and their answers ...