Google Cloud Platform for Architects

Google Cloud Storage – Fishing in a Bucket

Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is what you ought to use to store unstructured data such as images, videos, or other static content, as well as for backups, disaster recovery, and other cool or cold data. GCS stores data in the form of objects on an underlying distributed filesystem, called Colossus. Colossus is Google-proprietary and a very high-performance filesystem.

You can transfer data in or out of GCS using a command-line tool called gsutil (different from gcloud, which we've used for compute-related operations so far). Under the hood, gsutil makes RESTful API calls to the GCS service, so we can do the same and interact with GCS via the web console or client apps.

This chapter is meant to get you ...