The term VPC is used in AWS to refer to the networking layer for EC2 Cloud Virtual Machines, and AWS VPC networks are regional. This implies that in AWS, if you have VMs in different regions, for example, one in the US and the other in the UK, they would have to be in different VPCs.

In the Google Cloud world, on the other hand, resources on the same VPC can reside absolutely anywhere; two GCE VMs could be in different continents, while still residing in the same VPC. How is this possible? Well, clearly under the hood there is an internal routing mechanism that is hidden from the user and that makes this possible. This actually implies that Google VPC networks are a level up vis-a-vis their equivalents on other cloud platforms. We will have more to say on this just a bit later in the chapter when we discuss subnets: