Google Compute Engine

Chapter 4. Storage: Cloud Storage

Google  Cloud Storage provides the ability to store binary large objects (a.k.a. BLOBs) in the cloud. You can read or write BLOBs from anywhere on the Internet, subject to access control that you can define, including from any Compute Engine instance, no matter which zone it is in. Your BLOBs are also stored in a durable, available, and secure way, and are served by a massively scalable distributed infrastructure.

This makes Cloud Storage ideal for two key scenarios:

• Storing and retrieving unstructured data from any Compute Engine instance in any zone

• Storing and retrieving unstructured data from both inside and outside Compute Engine (e.g., for sharing data with your customers)

A particularly important special case of the second scenario is importing or exporting large quantities of data into and out of Google’s Cloud Platform.

Note

It is important to understand the difference between durability and availability when it comes to storage. Roughly speaking, durability is defined by the probability that an object will not be permanently and irrevocably lost, whereas availability is defined by the probability that an object can be retrieved at a particular point in time. Cloud Storage provides a service-level agreement (SLA) that clearly specifies what level of availability the customer should expect and what sort of compensation the customer will receive if that SLA is not met. Cloud Storage offers multiple classes of storage, at different ...