GCP Storage 101

• Use cases:
  • website content
  • storing data for archiving and disaster recovery
    • distributing large data objects to users via direct download
• Scalable to exabytes
• Time to first byte in milliseconds
• Very high availability across all storage classes
• Single API across storage classes

Signed URLs

• Valet key access to buckets and objects via ticket:
  • crytographically signed URL
  • time-limited
  • operations specfied in ticket: HTTP, GET, PUT, DELETE (not POST)
  • any user with URL can invoke permitted operations
• Example:
  • gsutil signurl -d 10m path/to/privatekey.p12 gs://bucket/object

Strong Global Consistency

• read-after-write
• read-after-metadata-update
• read-after-delete
• bucket-listing
• object-listing
• granting access to resources

Choose among Cloud Storage classes

Cloud Bigtable

• Fully managed NoSQL, wide-column database service for terabyte applications
• Accessed using HBased API
• Native compatibility with big data Hadoop ecosystems
• Managed, scalable storage
• Data encryption in-flight and at rest
• Control access with IAM
• Bigtable drives major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail

Cloud SQL

• managed RDBMS
• offers MYSQL and PostgreSQLBeta databases as a service
• automatic replication
• managed backups
• vertical scaling (read & write)
• horizontal scaling (read)
• google security
• enable binary logging to use point-in-time recovery but it may slightly affect write performance

Cloud Spanner

• horizontally scalable RDBMS
• strong global consistency
• managed instances with high availablity
• SQL queries
  • ANSI 2011 with extensions
• automatic replication

Cloud Datastore

• designed for application backends
• supports transactions
• includes a free daily quota

Comparing Storage Options

Decision Flowchart