[Google Compute Engine] Some upcoming changes to our Europe region

[Google Compute Team]

Greetings Google Cloud Platform users,

We wanted to give you advanced notice that we will be launching a new Google Compute Engine zone in Europe, europe-west1-c, in 2 weeks. This zone will be all new, shiny Ivybridge machines with our latest and greatest infrastructure (power, cooling, network fabric, servers, etc.).

We are also deprecating europe-west1-a so that we can perform a full infrastructure refresh. europe-west1-a will remain online and fully functional until March 29, 2015, when the zone will go offline. After March 29, 2015, all VMs still running in europe-west1-a will be terminated and deleted, and all persistent disks still in europe-west1-a will also be deleted.

Infrastructure refreshes are rare; zones typically run for three to five years between refreshes. We are working hard to make these refreshes completely transparent to your instances and applications, as we have done via our Live Migration technology for within-zone maintenance events. It’s our goal to make even ground-up infrastructure refreshes like this non-disruptive in the future.

In the meantime, we wanted to make sure you had plenty of time to orchestrate your exit from europe-west1-a. You can move your VMs from europe-west1-a to europe-west1-b anytime (or to europe-west1-c when it launches in 2 weeks) by creating a disk snapshot and then launching a new VM in the new zone using the disk snapshot. More detailed information on how to move your VMs can be found here. We will also be providing tools to help automate this move process before the end of January 2015.

We also plan to launch an additional Europe zone in by the end of Q1 2015.

If you require additional assistance moving your instances and are a Platinum, Gold, or Silver support customer, please contact support via the Google for Work Support Center; otherwise, please send an email to gc-...@google.com.

As always, please send us any feedback via the normal channels.

Thank you for your support,

-- ScottVW, on behalf of the Google Cloud Platform