A zone in which your VM will reside is a required choice when creating a VM. Compute Engine resources live in regions or zones. Recall that a region is a specific geographical location where you can run your resources and each region has one or more zones. Resources that live in a zone, such as instances or persistent disks, are referred to as zonal resources. Other resources, such as static external IP addresses, are regional. Regional resources can be used by any resources in that region, regardless of zone, while zonal resources can only be used by other resources in the same zone. The compute zone will decide the billing for your VM along with the machine type. Distributing multiple VMs across multiple zones is recommended for higher availability. The following screenshot lists some of the zones available to us on GCP: