If you need to store and retrieve a large number of files, or you need to store a multi terabyte file exports or dumps of data for data analytics pipelines, Cloud Storage is the ideal solution for you. In the module, best practices for using Cloud Storage, you learn concepts related to creating buckets, storing and retrieving file objects, and choosing suitable storage classes to address issues such as data privacy, compliance and latency. You learn which operations are eventually consistent and which ones are strongly consistent. To design for scalability and resilience, you'll learn how to compose large objects using smaller component objects. You can use Cloud Storage to store and serve static content such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. We'll explore how to set up a course configuration to allow your website to pull content from the bucket. You'll learn best practices related to naming buckets and managing traffic. We'll also discuss how to secure buckets and objects using IAM permissions, access control lists, signed URLs, and more. First, we'll go over performing operations on buckets and objects. Resources are entities and Google Cloud. They include Projects, buckets, which are the basic Cloud Storage container, and objects, the individual pieces of data that you store in Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Storage has four primary storage classes with different characteristics, use cases, and prices for your needs. Standards Storage is best for data that is frequently accessed or stored for only brief periods of time. There is no minimum duration for data stored using the standard storage class. When using a single region, co-locating your resources maximizes the performance for data intensive computations and can reduce network charges. When used in a dual region, you still get optimized performance when accessing Google Cloud products that are located in one of the associated regions. But you also get the improved availability and fault tolerance that comes from storing data in geographically separate locations. When used in a multi-region, standard storage is appropriate for storing data that is accessed around the world. Standards storage use cases include serving website content, streaming videos, executing interactive workloads, and serving data supporting mobile and gaming applications. Nearline storage is a low cost, highly durable storage service for storing infrequently accessed data. Nearline storage is a better choice than the standard storage in scenarios where a slightly lower availability, a 30-day minimum storage duration, and costs for data access are acceptable trade-offs for lower at rest storage costs. Nearline storage is ideal for data you plan to read or modify, on average once per month or less. Nearline storage is appropriate for data backup, long-tail multimedia content, and data archiving. Coldline storage is a very low cost, highly durable storage service for storing infrequently accessed data. Coldline storage is a better choice than Standard Storage or Nearline Storage. In scenarios where a slightly lower availability and 90 day minimum storage duration and higher costs for data access or acceptable trade-offs for lower at rest storage costs. Coldline Storage is ideal for data you plan to read or modify at once most a quarter. Archive storage is the lowest cost, highly durable storage service for data archiving, online backup, and disaster recovery. Archive storage has higher costs for data access and operations, as well as a 365 day minimum storage duration. Archive storage is the best choice for data that you plan to access less than once a year or never at all. Archive storage is excellent for cold data storage, such as data stored for legal or regulatory reasons. It is also a good choice for data that will be used only for disaster recovery. We've discussed the four primary storage classes and differentiated between them in terms of minimum duration, availability, and use cases. There are a number of characteristics that apply to all Google Cloud Storage data regardless of storage class. These include unlimited storage with no minimum object size requirement, worldwide accessibility and storage locations, low latency and high durability, geo-redundancy if data is stored in a multi-region or dual region, and a uniform experience which extends to security tools and APIs.
