Cloud Firestore locations

When you provision a Cloud Firestore instance, you must choose a location for the instance. To reduce latency and increase availability, store your data close to the users and services that need it.

If your project is on the pay-as-you-go Blaze pricing plan, then you can optionally create multiple databases in your project, each with its own location setting.

Be aware that once you provision a database instance, you cannot change its location setting.

Types of locations

You can store your Cloud Firestore data in a multi-region location or a regional location .

Multi-region locations

Select a multi-region location to maximize the availability and durability of your database.

A multi-region location consists of a defined set of regions where multiple replicas of the database are stored. Each replica is either a read-write replica which contains all of the data in the database or a witness replica which does not maintain a full set of data but participates in replication.

By replicating the data between multiple regions, data can continue to be served even with the loss of an entire region. Within a region, data is replicated across zones so that data can continue to be served within that region even with the loss of a zone.

Cloud Firestore supports the following multi-region locations:

Regional locations

A regional location is a specific geographic place, such as South Carolina. Data in a regional location is replicated in multiple zones within a region .

Select a regional location for lower costs, for lower write latency if your application is sensitive to latency, or for co-location with other Google Cloud resources .

Cloud Firestore supports the following regional resource locations:

Location SLA

Your Cloud Firestore location type determines the Service Level Agreement (SLA) uptime percentage:

Location pricing

Your Cloud Firestore location determines the cost of database operations.

For a comprehensive explanation of pricing per region and per region type, see Understand Cloud Firestore billing .

View the location of your databases

In the Firebase console, go to the Cloud Firestore Data tab to view the list of your database instances and their locations.

Possible location dependencies due to "location for default Google Cloud resources"

The "location for default Google Cloud resources" is the location setting for any project resources associated with Google App Engine , including the following:

• default Cloud Firestore database instance
• default Cloud Storage for Firebase bucket with the name format of *.appspot.com
• Google Cloud Scheduler used specifically with 1st gen scheduled functions

This "location for default Google Cloud resources" is an immutable setting. Also, when you set the location for one of the associated resources, you indirectly set the location for all of them due to their common association with App Engine .

However, with many changes to the Firebase and Google Cloud ecosystem over the years, the associations of resources to App Engine have been changing. Most notably, starting October 30, 2024 , all newly provisioned default Cloud Storage for Firebase buckets have the name format *.firebasestorage.app , and they are not associated with App Engine .

Here are the details of what changed in the possible location dependencies:

• Starting October 30, 2024 , if the default Cloud Firestore instance and the default Cloud Storage for Firebase bucket are not yet provisioned:

  • Provisioning the default Cloud Firestore instance sets the location for any future App Engine app provisioned in the project. However, it does not dictate the location of the future default Cloud Storage bucket.

  • Provisioning the default Cloud Storage bucket no longer provisions an App Engine app. Thus, the location of the default Cloud Storage bucket does not dictate the location of the future default Cloud Firestore instance.

• Starting October 30, 2024 , if the default Cloud Firestore instance has already been provisioned, but the default Cloud Storage for Firebase bucket has not been provisioned:

  • The existing default Cloud Firestore instance does not dictate the location of the future default Cloud Storage bucket ( *.firebasestorage.app ).

• Starting October 30, 2024 , if the default Cloud Storage for Firebase bucket has already been provisioned(specifically, the *.appspot.com bucket) , but the default Cloud Firestore instance has not been provisioned:

  • Back when the default Cloud Storage bucket ( *.appspot.com ) was provisioned, an App Engine app was also provisioned, and thus the location of the future default Cloud Firestore instance was set at that time. Even if you delete the *.appspot.com bucket, you can't delete the App Engine app, so the location setting of the future default Cloud Firestore instance is already set.

If you used 1st gen scheduled functions, then their location is set to the location for default Google Cloud resources. This is because Cloud Scheduler and App Engine previously had an association with each other. Also, if you set up 1st gen scheduled functions before provisioning other resources that shared this location setting, then you set their location, too.

Note that if you have an App Engine app with a location of either us-central or europe-west , then your location for default Google Cloud resources is considered multi-regional .

Next steps

• To create a Cloud Firestore database in a specific location, visit Get started with Cloud Firestore .

• For more information about building applications to meet your latency, availability, and durability requirements, refer to Geography and Regions .