Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage is an easy, secure, reliable, and highly available Cloud Object Storage service.

Cloud Storage is ideal for a variety of storage needs. From serving analytical data to archiving regulatory compliance data through its flexible storage classes.

The Standard storage class provides the highest levels of availability and performance and is highly suitable for data that is accessed frequently or is short-lived. While the Nearline class offers fast, inexpensive, and highly durable storage. Designed for data that is accessed infrequently, including long-tail content. The Coldline class offers the benefits of Nearline storage while optimizing colder data use cases, such as disaster recovery.

All storage classes have no minimum fee and offer Pay As You Go (Pay As You Go) capacity pricing. Object lifecycle tools allow you to reduce usage costs by scheduling deletion and transitioning data objects to lower storage classes as needed.

Cloud Storage provides 99.999999999% durability by storing objects redundantly across multiple devices located in multiple Zones (Data Centers). And encrypting data in transmission while stored to ensure its security, integrity, and privacy. Multi-region and dual-region locations provide additional protection against regional failures by storing data in at least two geographically separated locations.

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What is Google Cloud Storage?

The object storage service provided by Google Cloud is called Google Cloud Storage. It offers several extremely intriguing out-of-the-box capabilities that can simplify development and lower operational costs, such as object versioning or fine-grain permissions (by object or bucket). Several distinct services are built using Google Cloud Storage.

What advantages does this form of storage have? Object storage is a difficult subject to understand. This kind of storage is quite uncommon in conventional on-premises systems, where capacity is more constrained and communication is quick and exclusive. However, the end user finds the object storage system’s operation to be incredibly straightforward. In plain English, its value proposition is that it allows you to get and send whatever file you want via a REST API. This can grow infinitely as each object can grow up to a terabyte in size. In cloud storage, various “namespaces” known as buckets are used to aggregate related objects. A single object will only be associated with one bucket even though a bucket can hold several objects.

Due to its low cost (cents per GB), serverless approach, and simplicity, this storage format is very well-liked in cloud-native systems. The cloud provider is subsequently given the difficult tasks of data replication, availability, integrity, capacity planning, etc. The disadvantage of object storage is that there is no alternative to using the REST API to access the data; as a result, the standard method for developing systems, managing data, and organizing filesystem-style access doesn’t work.

Google Cloud Storage Classes, and Lifecycle Management Rules

The various storage classes and the application of Lifecycle Management Rules for the data buckets are two of Google Cloud Storage’s perhaps most underappreciated features. Utilizing these features can significantly reduce costs and ongoing operational expenses.

Storage Classes

You must choose one of the three storage classes available in Google Cloud Storage for your buckets: Standard (which can be Regional or Multi-Regional), Nearline, or Coldline. The typical method is to choose Standard, where you may decide whether to store your bucket across various Google Cloud Regions or in a single Google Cloud Region. Since you obtain very efficient and accessible storage, this works well in a variety of situations.

There are, however, several circumstances in which it is acceptable for the data’s availability to be decreased because it is not intended to be accessed regularly. The Nearline and Coldline storage classes are alternatives that can and ought to be investigated in such circumstances. When compared to the normal storage class, they can easily cut costs by more than 50%.

Data that is accessed less frequently than once per month is suited for the Nearline storage type. Data that will only be used to create an overall monthly report is one example use case. On the other hand, cold line storage is intended for data that is accessed even less frequently—say, just once a year or fewer. Therefore, archival storage benefits greatly from this storage class. Keeping a copy of data that the company needs to preserve for a long time (like 10 years) to comply with various regulatory obligations is one use case for the Coldline storage class.

Lifecycle Management Rules

The fact that the same type of data (i.e., data in the same bucket) may require different treatment throughout its existence presents one of the challenges of effectively utilizing storage classes (and other Cloud Storage features). If you use Google Cloud Storage buckets, for instance, to store your application logs, you might need high availability for the data during the first month (including versioning each object as a safeguard against data tampering), possibly less availability (without versioning) for the following six months, and eventually retain a copy of those logs for the next five or more years due to compliance requirements.

You can enable Google Cloud Storage Lifecycle Management rules for these kinds of situations. You can easily set business logic rules for each bucket using this fantastic built-in functionality of Google Cloud Storage. With the use of these rules, you may specify actions like automatically switching items across storage classes, turning off versioning, or even deleting objects after a predetermined amount of time. At the end of the month, using these features and putting lifecycle rules in place can result in significant and observable cost reductions.

Google Cloud Storage Features

1. Storage Class

Standard Storage: Suitable for frequent access to “hot” data, including websites, video streaming, and mobile apps.
Nearline Storage: Low cost. Good for data that stores for at least 30 days, including longtail backups of data and multimedia content.
Coldline Storage: Very low cost. Good for data that stores for at least 90 days, including disaster recovery.
Archive Storage: Lowest cost. Good for data that can be stored for at least 365 days, including regulatory archives.

2. Scalable

This has almost infinitely scalable (unlimited capacity). Whether supporting small applications or building large multi-exabyte systems, Cloud Storage can handle it.

3. Consistent

Never use old data. After you successfully write, overwrite, or delete an object, all subsequent GET calls will immediately return the correct object data and metadata.

4. Durable

Cloud Storage achieves 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of annual resilience, achieved by storing objects redundantly across multiple devices across multiple availability zones. Checksums are stored and re-validated regularly to verify data integrity at rest proactively and to detect data corruption in transit. Data in multi-region and dual-region is stored in at least 2 geographically separated locations for added protection against failures across regions.

5. Available

All storage classes offer high availability. Standard Storage has a 99.95% monthly availability Service Level Agreement (SLA) for multi-region or dual-region locations and a 99.9% SLA for regional areas. Nearline and Coldline Storage have 99.9% SLAs in some or two regions and 99.0% SLAs in regional locations.

Google Cloud Storage

What is Google Cloud Storage?