GOOGLE CLOUD STORAGE

Cloud storage is a storage service in Google Cloud. An object is an immutable piece of data which can be of any file format. Usually, the objects are stored in containers called buckets. All buckets are associated with a project and projects can be grouped under an organization.

After you create a project, you can create Cloud storage buckets, upload objects, download objects, rename or delete the objects. You can grant permissions uniformly across the bucket for all objects or specifically for each object for specific members or applications or to everyone available on the internet(public).

Google Cloud Hierarchy

Below is a real world example of Cloud storage hierarchy:

Organization: Your company called ABC Tech creates an organization in Google Cloud called abcinc.org.

Project: ABC Tech has different applications targeted to different countries. For example it has a mobile payments application dedicated only for US users. Let’s say that this application uses Google Cloud resources for some data processing. Thus, each application is associated with a project for data privacy and isolation.

Bucket: A bucket is a container which holds the cloud storage objects i.e. files of an format. For example you can have a bucket to hold images which your application generates and another bucket to store csv files which your application might require for data analysis.

Object: An object is an individual file like data.json or example.png.

Basic tools for Cloud Storage

Here are the multiple ways you can interact with cloud storage:

Console: The google Cloud Storage is a visual interface to manage your data using browser.

gsutil: gsutil is a command-line utility that allows you to interact with Cloud Storage through a terminal. If you use other services in Google Cloud, you can download Google Cloud SDK which includes gsutil along with gcloud tools for other services.

Client libraries: The Cloud Storage Client libraries allows you to manage data using one of your preferred languages among C++, C#, Python, Java, Node.js, Go, Ruby and PHP.

Rest APIs: You can manage your data using XML or JSON API.

Use Cases

To store data that needs to be shared between multiple instances and does not need to be on persistent attached storage. For example, log files generated by your application can be stored on Cloud Storage and analyzed by programs running on Cloud Dataproc Spark cluster.

Backup and archival storage, such as persistent disk snapshots, back-ups of on-premises systems and data kept for audit and compliance requirements but not likely to be accessed.

As a staging area for uploaded data. For example, a mobile application which generated images can be uploaded to Cloud Storage. After completing the upload, Cloud Function can then trigger the next steps of processing.

Securing data

Identity and access management: Use IAM to control access the Cloud Storage resources. You can specify access at the bucket level as well as at the individual object level. You can grant users certain types of access to buckets and objects such as insert, update and delete.

Data encryption: Cloud storage uses server-side encryption to encrypt data by default. You can also use additional data encryption options such as managed customer-managed encryption keys and customer-supplied encryption keys.

Authentication: You can also ensure that anyone who accesses data has proper credentials.

Bucket lock: Govern how long objects in buckets must be retained by specifying a retention policy.

Object Versioning: When a live version of an object is replaced or deleted, it can be retained as a noncurrent version if you enable Object Versioning.