Google Cloud offers three main types of data storage: block, file, and object storage.
Compute Engine offers several storage options for your VM instances. Each of the following storage options has unique price and performance characteristics:
Persistent Disk volumes provide high-performance and redundant network storage. Each Persistent Disk volume is striped across hundreds of physical disks.
By default, VMs use zonal Persistent Disk, and store your data on volumes located within a single zone, such as
us-west1-c.You can also create regional Persistent Disk volumes, which synchronously replicate data between disks located in two zones and provide protection if a zone becomes unavailable.
Google Cloud Hyperdisk volumes offer the fastest redundant network storage for Compute Engine, with configurable performance and volumes that can be dynamically resized.
Local SSDs are physical drives attached directly to the same server as your VM. They can offer better performance, but are ephemeral.
Cloud Storage buckets provide affordable object storage.
You can also use Filestore with your VMs for high performance file storage.
Each storage option has unique price and performance characteristics. For cost comparisons, see disk pricing. If you are not sure which option to use, the most common solution is to add a Persistent Disk volume to your instance.
Persistent Disk {block storage}
Persistent Disk volumes are durable network storage devices that your instances can access like physical disks in a desktop or a server. The data on each Persistent Disk volume is distributed across several physical disks. Compute Engine manages the physical disks and the data distribution for you to ensure redundancy and optimal performance.
Persistent Disk volumes are located independently from your virtual machine (VM) instances, so you can detach or move Persistent Disk volumes to keep your data even after you delete your instances. Persistent Disk performance scales automatically with size, so you can resize your existing Persistent Disk volumes or add more Persistent Disk volumes to a VM to meet your performance and storage space requirements.
Filestore {File Storge}
Filestore instances are fully managed file servers on Google Cloud that can be connected to multiple client types:
why?
As a type of file storage, Filestore supports multiple concurrent application instances accessing the same file system simultaneously. For Google Kubernetes Engine users, for example, this multiwriter access support offers a powerful alternative to block storage products, such as Persistent Disk, which support only single write access.
Cloud Storage {object Storage}
Cloud Storage is a managed service for storing unstructured data. Store any amount of data and retrieve it as often as you like.
features
Automatic storage class transitions With features like Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) and Autoclass you can easily optimize costs with object placement across storage classes
Continental-scale and SLA-backed replication - Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of zero
Fast and flexible transfer services - data transfer service/ appliance
Default and configurable data security - access management
Leading analytics and ML/AI tools
Storage Options/Class
What is a Storage Transfer Service?
Storage Transfer Service automates the transfer of data to, from, and between object and file storage systems, including Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, Azure Storage, on-premises data, and more. It can be used to transfer large amounts of data quickly and reliably, without the need to write any code.
transfer options
