Creating a VPC in a different region

A region is a specific geographical location where you can deploy apps, services, and other IBM Cloud® resources. Regions consist of one or more zones, which are physical data centers that house the compute, network, and storage resources, with related cooling and power, for host services and applications. Zones are isolated from each other, which makes sure that no shared single point of failure within a region occurs.

The IBM Cloud® VPC service is regional. To allow for disaster recovery (DR), you must provide the ability for recovery by using failover to an alternative region, by establishing a VPC in one of our other regions.

Virtual Private Cloud is available in the following IBM Cloud® regions.

Table 1. IBM Cloud regions for North and South America
This table displays the IBM Cloud regions and is organized by geographical location. Click on the tab for the geographical location you are interested in. You then see all the IBM Cloud regions for that geographical location.
Location	Region	API Endpoint
US South (Dallas)	us-south	`us-south.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
US East (Washington DC)	us-east	`us-east.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
Brazil (São Paulo)	br-sao	`br-sao.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
Canada (Toronto)	ca-tor	`ca-tor.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`

Table 1. IBM Cloud regions for Europe
This table displays the IBM Cloud regions and is organized by geographical location. Click on the tab for the geographical location you are interested in. You then see all the IBM Cloud regions for that geographical location.
Location	Region	API Endpoint
United Kingdom (London)	eu-gb	`eu-gb.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
EU Germany (Frankfurt)	eu-de	`eu-de.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
Spain (Madrid)	eu-es	`eu-es.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`

For x86-64 dedicated host profiles, the Madrid region only supports dedicated host profiles with instance storage. For more information, see Dedicated host profiles.

Table 1. IBM Cloud regions for Asia Pacific
This table displays the IBM Cloud regions and is organized by geographical location. Click on the tab for the geographical location you are interested in. You then see all the IBM Cloud regions for that geographical location.
Location	Region	API Endpoint
Japan (Tokyo)	jp-tok	`jp-tok.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
Japan (Osaka)	jp-osa	`jp-osa.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`
Australia (Sydney)	au-syd	`au-syd.iaas.cloud.ibm.com`

The Regional API (VPC) endpoint is automatically set by the IBM Cloud® CLI when you log in to a specific region.

Logging in to a specific region by using the CLI

When you log in to IBM Cloud®, you can specify a region or choose it later. For example, to log in to the global API endpoint in the Dallas (us-south) region directly, run the following commands. These commands vary according to whether you have a federated account (SSO) or a non-federated account.

For a federated account,

ibmcloud login -a https://cloud.ibm.com -r us-south --sso

For a non-federated account,

ibmcloud login -a https://cloud.ibm.com -r us-south

To choose the region later, do not specify the -r <region> parameter and the CLI prompts you to choose a region.

Example output:

API endpoint: cloud.ibm.com

Get One Time Code from https://identity-2.eu-central.iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/passcode to proceed.
Open the URL in the default browser? [Y/n]> y
One Time Code >
Authenticating...
OK

Select an account:
1. MyAccount (00a11aa1a11aa11a1111a1111aaa11aa) <-> 1234567
2. TeamAccount (2bb222bb2b22222bbb2b2222bb2bb222) <-> 7654321
Enter a number> 2
Targeted account TeamAccount (2bb222bb2b22222bbb2b2222bb2bb222) <-> 7654321


Targeted resource group Default

Select a region (or press enter to skip):
1. au-syd
2. in-che
3. jp-osa
4. jp-tok
6. eu-de
7. eu-es
8. eu-gb
9. ca-tor
10. us-south
11. us-east
12. br-sao

Enter a number> 12

Targeted region us-south


API endpoint:      https://cloud.ibm.com
Region:            us-south
User:              first.last@email.com
Account:           TeamAccount (2bb222bb2b22222bbb2b2222bb2bb222) <-> 7654321
Resource group:    Default
CF API endpoint:
Org:
Space:

...

Switch regions by using the CLI

To get the latest status of the VPC regions, run the following command:

ibmcloud is regions

To switch to a different region, run the ibmcloud target -r <region> command. For example, to switch to the Washington DC region, run the following command:

ibmcloud target -r us-east

To check your current location, run the following command:

ibmcloud target

Switch regions by using the API

To interact with the Regional VPC API by using REST, direct your request to the API endpoint that is associated with the region in which you want to create resources. The region's API endpoint is shown in the previous table. You also can find the endpoints that are associated with the regions by running the following command:

ibmcloud is regions

For example, to get the list of VPCs in the us-south region, run the following command:

curl "https://us-south.iaas.cloud.ibm.com/v1/vpcs?version=$api_version&generation=2" -H "Authorization: $iam_token"

Get zones by using the CLI

To get the list of zones available for each region, run the command ibmcloud is zones in the target region. In the following example, the first command switches the target to us-south region. The second command lists the available zones.

ibmcloud target -r us-east; ibmcloud is zones
Switched to region us-east
                   
API endpoint:      https://cloud.ibm.com
Region:            us-east
User:              first.last@email.com
Account:           TeamAccount (a1234567) <-> 7654321
Resource group:    No resource group targeted, use 'ibmcloud target -g RESOURCE_GROUP'
CF API endpoint:   
Org:               
Space:             
Listing zones in target region us-east under account TeamAccount as user first.last@email.com...
Name        Region    Status   
us-east-1   us-east   available   
us-east-2   us-east   available   
us-east-3   us-east   available

For more information about available command options, see ibmcloud is zones.