CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-cloud-storage
Daniel Danciu
Daniel Danciu

Reputation: 143

Is there a way to figure out in which region a Google Cloud Storage bucket is hosted?

NCBI (the National Center for Biotech Info) generously provided their data for 3rd parties to consume. The data is located in cloud buckets such as gs://sra-pub-run-1/. I would like to read this data without incurring additional costs, which I believe can be achieved by reading it from the same region as where the bucket is hosted. Unfortunately, I can't figure out in which region the bucket is hosted (NCBI mentions in their docs that's in the US, but not where in the US). So my questions are:

  1. Is there a way to figure out in which region a bucket that I don't own, like gs://sra-pub-run-1/ is hosted?
  2. Is my understanding correct that reading the data from instances in the same region is free of charge? What if the GCS bucket is multi-region?

Doing a simple gsutil ls -b -L either provides no information (when listing a specific directory within sra-pub-run-1 or I get a permission denied error if I try to list info on gs://sra-pub-run-1/ directly using:

gsutil -u metagraph ls -b gs://sra-pub-run-1/

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4195

Answers (1)

Brandon Yarbrough
Brandon Yarbrough

Reputation: 38379

You cannot specify a specific Compute Engine zone as a bucket location, but all Compute Engine VM instances in zones within a given region have similar performance when accessing buckets in that region.

Billing-wise, egressing data from Cloud Storage into a Compute Engine instance in the same location/region (for example, US-EAST1 to US-EAST1) is free, regardless of zone.

So, check the "Location constraint" of the GCS bucket (gsutil ls -Lb gs://bucketname ), and if it says "US-EAST1", and if your GCE instance is also in US-EAST1, downloading data from that GCS bucket will not incur an egress fee.

Upvotes: 1

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