How to change Region / Zone in Google Cloud? - google-cloud-platform

Question

I am very new to Google Cloud. I was able to setup a wordpress site and am working on it now. However, it appears that my vm instance is using the following asia-east1-a for its zone. I was able to change the Region and Zone using gcloud commands with the following output:
$ gcloud config list compute/region
Your active configuration is: [default]
[compute]
region = us-east4
$ gcloud config list compute/zone
Your active configuration is: [default]
[compute]
zone = us-east4-b
How does one change the active default to the new set zone? I would like my instance to run in the North East Coast of the USA?
Thanks,
T

Answer 1

Use commands below at cloud shell.
To check your preferred region:
$ gcloud compute regions list
To change compute regions, I select us-east4 region:
$ gcloud config set compute/region us-east4
Updated property [compute/region].
$ gcloud config list compute/region
[compute]
region = us-east4
In a similar way, you can change compute/zone.

Answer 2

As described here, project-info metadata can be added per project to specify the default regions and zones. This is used only at the time of initializing gcloud (using gcloud init).
In addition, gcloud supports locally setting the default region and zone using the compute/region and compute/zone configurations (which is what you seem to have added to your local gcloud config). When these properties are set, they will override any configuration set in the project-info.
Since you have set these properties according to your requirements, I think your defaults are set as long as you're using that gcloud configuration.
Do remember that you can always override the zone and region using the --zone and --region arguments to any of the gcloud commands.
Moving instance from one zone to another
Changing the default zone/region does not move any of the existing VMs to a new zone. If you wish to move a VM from one zone to another, you can take a snapshot of the persistent disks, launch a new instance in the desired zone using the snapshot and cleanup the resources used by the original VM.
You can do this using either gcloud or follow a set of steps manually to achieve the same result.
gcloud compute instances move INSTANCE_NAME --zone SOURCE_ZONE --destination-zone DESTINATION_ZONE
In detail, Compute Engine will:
Take snapshots of persistent disks attached to the source instance.
Create copies of the persistent disks in the destination zone.
For instances moving within the same region, temporarily promote any ephemeral external IP addresses assigned to the instance to a static
external IP address.
Create a new instance in the destination zone.
Attach the newly created persistent disks to your new instance.
Assign an external IP address to the new instance. If necessary, demote the address back to an ephemeral external IP address.
Delete the snapshots, original disks, and original instance.
If you want to manually move your instance, you can also perform these
steps by hand.

Answer 3

If you don't remember the specific commands, another option is to change the region and zone in the gcloud configurations file which is located in:
~/.config/gcloud/configurations/config_default
And contain the structure below:
[core]
account = my-account#my-domain
project = my-project
[compute]
zone = asia-south1-a
region = asia-south1
After changing region to us-central-1 you'll get the following output:
gcloud config list compute/region
[compute]
region = us-central1
gcloud config configurations list
NAME IS_ACTIVE ACCOUNT PROJECT COMPUTE_DEFAULT_ZONE COMPUTE_DEFAULT_REGION
default True my-account#my-domain my-project us-central1-a us-central1
Reference to all GCP regions and zones.

Answer 4

Create Image of the existing instance and after create a new instance with a new zone who you like and uploaded this image with you create before

Answer 5

gcloud compute instances move INSTANCE_NAME --destination-zone=DESTINATION_ZONE [--async] [--zone=ZONE] [GCLOUD_WIDE_FLAG …]
gcloud compute instances move facilitates moving a Compute Engine virtual machine from one zone to another.
EXAMPLE :
gcloud compute instances move compute-instance-1 --zone us-central1-b --destination-zone us-central1-f