Regional clusters allow for higher availability, fault tolerance, and no-downtime upgrades. This makes your application more resilient and spread across multiple zones within a single region.

With a regional cluster, you have nodes deployed across the zones within that region, so expect that the number of nodes, total vCPUs, and total memory are larger than your zonal GKE deployment with the same configuration. The Kubernetes control plane (managed by GCP) is also spread out across the zones within the region, so you don’t need to worry about configuring it beyond deploying the cluster itself.