Regional clusters are still in the beta phase. To use these, we'll have to enable the gcloud beta command. We can enable it via this command:

# export CLOUDSDK_CONTAINER_USE_V1_API_CLIENT=false # gcloud config set container/use_v1_api false 
Updated property [container/use_v1_api].

Then we should be able to use the gcloud v1beta command to launch the regional cluster:

# gcloud beta container clusters create my-k8s-cluster --cluster-version 1.9.2-gke.1 --machine-type f1-micro --num-nodes 2 --network k8s-network --tags private --scopes=storage-rw,compute-ro --region us-central1 

Creating cluster my-k8s-cluster...done. Created [https://container.googleapis.com/v1beta1/projects/kubernetes-cookbook/zones/us-central1/clusters/my-k8s-cluster]. To inspect the contents of your cluster, go to: https://console.cloud.google.com/kubernetes/workload_/gcloud/us-central1/my-k8s-cluster?project=kubernetes-cookbook 

kubeconfig entry generated for my-k8s-cluster. NAME LOCATION MASTER_VERSION MASTER_IP MACHINE_TYPE NODE_VERSION NUM_NODES STATUS my-k8s-cluster us-central1 1.9.2-gke.1 35.225.71.127 f1-micro 1.9.2-gke.1 6 RUNNING

The command is quite similar to the one that creates a cluster, just with two differences: a beta flag is added before the group name container which indicates it's a v1beta command. The second difference is changing --zone to --region:

// list instance groups
# gcloud compute instance-groups list
NAME                                          LOCATION       SCOPE  NETWORK      MANAGED  INSTANCES
gke-my-k8s-cluster-default-pool-074ab64e-grp  us-central1-a  zone   k8s-network  Yes      2
gke-my-k8s-cluster-default-pool-11492dfc-grp  us-central1-c  zone   k8s-network  Yes      2
gke-my-k8s-cluster-default-pool-f2c90100-grp  us-central1-b  zone   k8s-network  Yes      2