Storage: Cloud Storage and Persistent Disk

Storage: Cloud Storage and Persistent Disk

Cloud Storage keeps objects in buckets with location, storage class, versioning, retention, lifecycle, encryption, and access configuration. Persistent Disk provides durable block storage for Compute Engine and supported workloads, with snapshots for backup and cloning.

Core ideas

• Bucket location can be regional, dual-region, or multi-region and affects placement, availability, latency, and price.
• Storage classes such as Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive fit different access patterns.
• Persistent Disk is block storage; its zone or regional configuration must match compute and resilience design.
• Lifecycle rules automate storage-class changes and deletion based on object conditions.

Design and operating model

Classify data by access pattern, retention, legal holds, residency, recovery point, and recovery time. Enforce uniform bucket-level access, use versioning or soft-delete features where rollback matters, automate lifecycle, and test recovery from snapshots or object versions.

Example

{
  "rule": [
    {
      "action": { "type": "SetStorageClass", "storageClass": "ARCHIVE" },
      "condition": { "age": 180, "matchesPrefix": ["audit/"] }
    },
    {
      "action": { "type": "Delete" },
      "condition": { "age": 2555, "matchesPrefix": ["audit/"] }
    }
  ]
}

Run examples in a disposable training project. Replace project IDs, Regions, identities, resource names, sizes, and policies with reviewed values, and verify current Google Cloud CLI and service requirements before production use.

Production guidance

• Avoid public object access and do not grant legacy project-wide basic roles.
• Use customer-managed keys only when their control benefit justifies key availability and rotation duties.
• Model operations, retrieval, early deletion, replication, and network transfer along with stored capacity.

The chapter quiz follows the lesson and checks both service vocabulary and architecture decisions.