Cloud Storage lets you choose among four different types of storage classes: Regional, Multi-regional, Nearline, and Coldline. Here's how to think about them. 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. Now, let's talk about how they differ. 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. Multi-regional storage on the other hand, cost a bit more but it's Geo-redundant. That 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 kilometers. 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. People use regional storage on the other hand, to store data close to their Compute Engine, virtual machines, or their Kubernetes engine clusters. That gives better performance for data-intensive computations. 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. For example, 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 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. 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 or have access to it in case of a disaster recovery event. Availability of these storage classes varies with Multi-regional having the highest availability of 99.95 percent followed by Regional with 99.9 percent and Nearline and Coldline with 99 percent. 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. Egress and data transfer charges may also apply. In addition to those charges, Nearline storage also incurs an access fee per gigabyte of data read and Coldline storage incurs a higher fee per gigabyte of data read. Regardless of which storage class you choose, there are several ways to bring data into cloud storage. Many customers simply use gsutil which is the cloud storage command from this cloud SDK. You can also move data in with a drag and drop in the GCP console, if you use the Google Chrome browser. But what if you have to upload terabytes or even petabytes of data? Google Cloud platform offers the online storage transfer service and the offline transfer appliance to help. The storage transfer service lets you schedule and manage batch transfers to cloud storage from another cloud provider from a different cloud storage region or from an HTTPS endpoint. The transfer appliance is a rackable, high-capacity storage server that you lease from Google Cloud. You simply connect it to your network, load it with data, and then ship it to an upload facility where the data is uploaded to cloud storage. This service enables you to securely transfer up to a petabyte of data on a single appliance. As of this recording, it's still beta and it's not available everywhere. So, check the website for details. There are other ways of getting your data into cloud storage as this storage option is tightly integrated with many of the Google cloud platform products and services. For example, you can import and export tables from and to BigQuery as well as Cloud SQL. You can also store App Engine logs, cloud data store backups, and objects used by App Engine applications like images. Cloud storage can also store instant startup scripts, Compute Engine images, and objects used by Compute Engine applications. In short, cloud storage is often the ingestion point for data being moved into the cloud and is frequently the long-term storage location for data.
