How to change Region / Zone in Google Cloud?

Question

I am very new to Google Cloud. I was able to setup a wordpress site and am working on it now. However, it appears that my vm instance is using the following asia-east1-a for its zone. I was able to change the Region and Zone using gcloud commands with the following output:

$ gcloud config list compute/region  Your active configuration is: [default] [compute] region = us-east4  $ gcloud config list compute/zone Your active configuration is: [default] [compute] zone = us-east4-b 

How does one change the active default to the new set zone? I would like my instance to run in the North East Coast of the USA?

Thanks, T

Answer 1

Use commands below at cloud shell.

To check your preferred region:

$ gcloud compute regions list 

To change compute regions, I select us-east4 region:

$ gcloud config set compute/region us-east4 

Updated property [compute/region].

$ gcloud config list compute/region  

[compute]

region = us-east4 

In a similar way, you can change compute/zone.

Answer 2

• As described here, project-info metadata can be added per project to specify the default regions and zones. This is used only at the time of initializing gcloud (using gcloud init).

• In addition, gcloud supports locally setting the default region and zone using the compute/region and compute/zone configurations (which is what you seem to have added to your local gcloud config). When these properties are set, they will override any configuration set in the project-info.

• Since you have set these properties according to your requirements, I think your defaults are set as long as you're using that gcloud configuration.

• Do remember that you can always override the zone and region using the --zone and --region arguments to any of the gcloud commands.

Moving instance from one zone to another

Changing the default zone/region does not move any of the existing VMs to a new zone. If you wish to move a VM from one zone to another, you can take a snapshot of the persistent disks, launch a new instance in the desired zone using the snapshot and cleanup the resources used by the original VM.

You can do this using either gcloud or follow a set of steps manually to achieve the same result.

gcloud compute instances move INSTANCE_NAME --zone SOURCE_ZONE --destination-zone DESTINATION_ZONE 

In detail, Compute Engine will:

• Take snapshots of persistent disks attached to the source instance.
• Create copies of the persistent disks in the destination zone.
• For instances moving within the same region, temporarily promote any ephemeral external IP addresses assigned to the instance to a static external IP address.
• Create a new instance in the destination zone.
• Attach the newly created persistent disks to your new instance.
• Assign an external IP address to the new instance. If necessary, demote the address back to an ephemeral external IP address.
• Delete the snapshots, original disks, and original instance.

If you want to manually move your instance, you can also perform these steps by hand.