Google Cloud consists of a set of physical assets, such as computers and hard disk drives, and virtual resources, such as virtual machines (VMs), that are contained in Google's data centre's around the globe. Each data centre location is in a region. Regions are available in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. Each region is a collection of zones, which are isolated from each other within the region. Each zone is identified by a name that combines a letter identifier with the name of the region. For example, zone a in the East Asia region is named asia-east1-a.

This distribution of resources provides several benefits, including redundancy in case of failure and reduced latency by locating resources closer to clients. This distribution also introduces some rules about how resources can be used together.

In cloud computing, what you might be used to thinking of as software and hardware products, become services. These services provide access to the underlying resources. The list of available Google Cloud services is long, and it keeps growing. When you develop your website or application on Google Cloud, you mix and match these services into combinations that provide the infrastructure you need, and then add your code to enable the scenarios you want to build.