• An unified object storage service. It is used as a staging area to move data into other GCP components like Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Dataproc.
• It is a blob storage with any format.
• Rather than storing data on the compute engine (It would be expensive as the compute engine goes away, disk goes away too), store it on Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage is a persistent storage, it is durable, replicated and also made globally available via HTTP URL.

Key Terms

• Buckets: Basic containers that hold your data. Everything that you store in Google Cloud Storage must be contained in a bucket. You can use buckets to organize your data and control access to your data, but unlike directories and folders, you cannot nest buckets.
• Bucket names: Should be unique as the name of the buckets stored in single Cloud Storage namespace. Also, bucket names can be used with a CNAME redirect, which means they need to conform to DNS naming conventions.
• Bucket labels: Bucket labels are key:value metadata pairs that allow you to group your buckets along with other Google Cloud.
• Objects: Objects are the individual pieces of data that you store in Google Cloud Storage. Objects have two components: object data and object metadata. The object data component is usually a file that you want to store in Google Cloud Storage. The object metadata component is a collection of name-value pairs that describe various object qualities. There is no limit on the number of objects that you can create in a bucket.

Data Handling

• You can set up a transfer service for ingesting data into Cloud Storage from AWS S3 buckets, our computers etc., for once or recurring .
• Permissions can be set at project, bucket and object level.

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