Google Cloud Platform for Developers

The global bucket namespace

All buckets in Cloud Storage share a global namespace, and each bucket must be uniquely named. In other words, no two buckets can share the same name, even if they exist in different projects. This has a number of implications for both process and security. In terms of process, systems should not depend absolutely on the ability to create a bucket with a given name, as there is no way to ensure that the desired bucket name does not already exist.

A common cause of bucket naming collisions is the use of semantic naming strategies. For example, if an application creates a dedicated bucket for each of its users, it might seem logical to use a naming strategy such as gs://example-user-data-<USER_ID>. Consider however, ...