Google Cloud and its Intricacies V4 (Cloud Storage)
In this module, we will discuss extensively Google Cloud Storage like Cloud BigTable, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Database (Relational Database) and Cloud Storage. Let’s begin with Cloud Storage.
Cloud Storage
Cloud Platform lets you choose from computing power to storage, big data, machine learning and application services for your web, mobile, analytics and back-end solutions. It’s global, it’s cost-effective, it’s open-source friendly and it’s designed for security. Let’s talk about Cloud Storage!
Cloud storage is often the ingestion point for data being moved into the cloud and is frequently the long-term storage location for data. Let’s start with Google Cloud Storage.
Object storage?
The best way to describe Cloud Storage is by using Object Storage.
Object storage is not the same as file storage, in which you manage your data as a hierarchy of folders or as block storage, in which your operating system manages your data as chunks of disk. Instead, object storage means you save to your storage, you keep the arbitrary bunch of bytes you are given and the storage lets you address it with a unique key. Often these unique keys are in the form of URLs which means object storage interacts nicely with Web technologies perfectly.
Cloud Storage works the same, except better. It’s a fully managed scalable service. That means that you don’t need to provision capacity ahead of time. Just make objects and the service stores them with high durability and high availability.
Cloud Storage can be used for a lot of storage means like, serving website content, backup, storing data for archival and disaster recovery, or distributing large data objects to your end-users via direct download.
Cloud Storage is not a file system because each of your objects in Cloud Storage has a URL. Each feels like a file in a lot of ways and that’s okay to use the word “file” informally to describe your objects, yet, it’s not a file system.
Cloud Storage is best for structured and unstructured, binary or object data like images, large media files and backups. SQL is best for web frameworks and in existing applications like storing user credentials and customer orders.
Storage Classes in Cloud Storage
— Regional, Multi-regional, Nearline, and Coldline Cloud Storage
Cloud Storage lets you choose among four different types of storage classes: Regional, Multi-regional, Nearline, and Coldline.
Multi-regional and Regional are high-performance object storage, whereas Nearline and Coldline are backup and archival storage. That’s why I placed that heavy dividing line between these two groups. All of the storage classes are accessed in comparable ways using the cloud storage API and they all offer millisecond access times.
Regional Storage
Regional storage lets you store your data in a specific GCP region: US Central one, Europe West one or Asia East one. It’s cheaper than Multi-regional storage but it offers less redundancy. This is high-performance object storage. It is used to store data close to their Compute Engine, Virtual Machines, or their Kubernetes engine clusters that give better performance for data-intensive computations.
IT Ops often prefer to use regional storage to store data close to their Compute Engine, Virtual Machines, or their Kubernetes engine clusters. This gives better performance for data-intensive computations.
Multi-regional Storage
This is high-performance object storage, it is the best fit for storing frequently accessed data. like website content, interactive workloads, or data that’s part of mobile and gaming applications.
Multi-regional storage, on the other hand, cost a bit more.
It’s Geo-redundant, which means you pick a broad geographical location like the United States, the European Union, or Asia and cloud storage stores your data in at least two geographic locations separated by at least 160 kilometres.
Multi-regional storage is appropriate for storing frequently accessed data. For example, website content, interactive workloads, or data that’s part of mobile and gaming applications.
Nearline storage
Nearline storage is a low-cost, highly durable service for storing infrequently accessed data. The storage class is a better choice than Multi-regional storage or Regional storage in scenarios where you plan to read or modify your data once a month or less on average.
E.G, if you want to continuously add files to cloud storage and plan to access those files once a month for analysis, Nearline storage is a great choice.
Coldline Storage
Coldline storage is the best choice for data that you plan to access at most once a year. This is due to its slightly lower availability, 90-day minimum storage duration, costs for data access, and higher per operation costs. For example, if you want to archive data, backup data or have access to it in case of a disaster recovery event.
Coldline storage is a very low cost, highly durable service for data archiving, online backup, and disaster recovery. Coldline storage is the best choice for data that you plan to access at most once a year.
Conclusion on Cloud Storage:
Availability of these storage classes varies with Multi-regional having the highest availability of 99.95 per cent followed by Regional with 99.9 per cent and Nearline and Coldline with 99 per cent. As for pricing, all storage classes incur a cost per gigabyte of data stored per month, with Multi-regional having the highest storage price and Coldline the lowest storage price.
Consider using Cloud Storage if you need to store immutable blobs larger than 10 megabytes such as large images or movies. If you are developing an application that transcodes large video files. This storage service provides petabytes of capacity with a maximum unit size of five terabytes per object.
In the next module, we will talk about other Google Cloud Storage, like Cloud BigTable, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Database (Relational Database). Stay tuned as we continue to give you the best insight and in-depth knowledge of cloud computing.
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Stay tuned and see you in the cloud.
Credits: Google Cloud Platform, Essentials and Infrastructure.
