Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage is GCP's object storage service for storing and accessing any amount of data. It's designed for durability, availability, and scalability. Use it for everything from website assets and backups to data lakes and machine learning training data.

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Key Concepts

Buckets

A bucket is a container for your data. Every object in Cloud Storage belongs to a bucket.

• Bucket names must be globally unique across all of GCP
• A bucket has a location (region, dual-region, or multi-region)
• A bucket has a default storage class
• You can set access controls at the bucket or object level

Objects

An object is a file stored in a bucket, along with its metadata:

• Objects have no size limit (up to 5 TB per object)
• Objects are immutable — you replace the entire object to update it
• Each object has a unique key (name) within its bucket

gs://my-app-assets/images/logo.png
  |         |              |
  bucket    folder         object key

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Storage Classes

Cloud Storage offers four storage classes with different cost and access characteristics: