[Google Compute Engine] us-central2-a going away on 12/31 and transparent scheduled maintenance coming soon to us-central1-a & b

[Google Compute Team]

Greetings Google Cloud Platform users,

We want to announce a change we will be making to our US footprint at the end of this year and also tell you about some technology improvements we'll be rolling out soon to keep Google Compute Engine zones online and your VMs running during scheduled maintenance.

Deprecating us-central2-a

In order to consolidate our US footprint into zones where we can offer transparent scheduled maintenance (next section), we are deprecating us-central2-a and will be taking it permanently offline at the end of this year. If you are using this zone, please move your application or workload to us-central1-a and/or us-central1-b sometime between November 11th and December 31st.

Rolling out transparent scheduled maintenance

We are putting the finishing touches on a system that makes our scheduled zone maintenance events transparent to your applications and workloads by automatically moving your virtual machines around scheduled outages or impending failures.

We have rolled out the software and infrastructure improvements to us-central1-a already, and we will be upgrading us-central1-b during its upcoming (and last!) offline maintenance window in early November.

We will send out more detailed information around transparent scheduled maintenance and VM migration in the coming weeks, including how to configure your VMs to respond to scheduled maintenance events, when we will start migrating your VMs, and all the usual documentation and release notes around this new behavior.

Stay tuned in 2014 for details on when we will be rolling this system out to our European zones as well.

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

Thank you for your support,

-- ScottVW, on behalf of the Google Cloud Platform