Moving a GCP instance to another zone is actually much simpler than initially thought. It’s just a single gcloud command.

gcloud compute instances move instance-name \
--zone us-central1-a \
--destination-zone us-central1-b

A few details about moving to another zone.

  • VM has to be running.
  • You may get a new internal or external IP address
  • Local SSDs are ephemeral, so you can’t move them.
  • When moving between regions, you may have to select a subnetwork.
  • You may have to change GPUs available in the destination if you use them.