GCP does not have a single global control plane. Each product has a separate control plane, and many/most of those are regional. GCE (Compute) does have a global control plane today.
The GCP Console, unlike other cloud providers, displays an aggregated view over all the regions. That means calling the control plane for a particular service which then in turn will do fan-out to all regions and merge the results.
For example a page might call the GCE global control plane:
(Specifying the location would call that particular region though)
During the incident the small (but critical) subset of Console pages which needed aggregated data from GCE's global control plane failed to load.
I agree it's unacceptable that the Console doesn't handle regional failures more gracefully, and it's very much been a priority to improve region down handling.
GCP does not have a single global control plane. Each product has a separate control plane, and many/most of those are regional. GCE (Compute) does have a global control plane today.
The GCP Console, unlike other cloud providers, displays an aggregated view over all the regions. That means calling the control plane for a particular service which then in turn will do fan-out to all regions and merge the results.
For example a page might call the GCE global control plane:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/v1/inst...
Or a different page might call this with - as the location to globally fan-out instead of talking to a particular region's control plane:
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/reference/rest/v2/pr...
(Specifying the location would call that particular region though)
During the incident the small (but critical) subset of Console pages which needed aggregated data from GCE's global control plane failed to load.
I agree it's unacceptable that the Console doesn't handle regional failures more gracefully, and it's very much been a priority to improve region down handling.
Source: I work on the GCP Console.