There are four primary storage
classes in Cloud storage. The first is standard storage. Standard storage is
considered best for frequently accessed or hot data. It's also great for data that's stored for only brief
periods of time. The second storage class
is nearline storage. This is best for storing
infrequently accessed data, like reading or modifying data on average once a month or less. Examples may include
data backups, long term multimedia
content, or data archiving. The third storage class
is coldline storage. This is also a low cost option for storing infrequently
accessed data. However, as compared
to near line storage, coldline storage is meant for reading or modifying
data at most, once every 90 days. The fourth storage class
is archive storage. This is the lowest cost option used ideally for data archiving, online backup and
disaster recovery. It's the best choice for
data that you plan to access less than once
a year because it has higher costs for data
access and operations in a 365 day minimum
storage duration. Although each of these four
classes has differences, it's worth noting that there are several characteristics
that apply across all of these
storage classes. These include unlimited storage with no minimum object
size requirement, worldwide accessibility
and locations, low latency and high durability, a uniform experience
which extends to security tools and API's, and geo-redundancy if data is stored in a multi-region
or dual region. This means placing
physical servers in geographically diverse
data centers to protect against catastrophic events
and natural disasters, and low balancing traffic
for optimal performance. Cloud storage also provides
a feature called auto-class, which automatically
transitions objects to appropriate storage
classes based on each object's access pattern. The feature moves data
that is not access to colder storage classes
to reduce storage costs, and moves data that is access to standard storage to
optimize future accesses. Auto-class simplifies
and automates cost saving for your
cloud storage data. Cloud storage has no minimum fee because you pay only
for what you use. Prior provisioning of
capacity isn't necessary. Cloud storage always
encrypts data on the server side
before it's written to disc at no additional charge. Data traveling between
a customer's device and Google is encrypted by
default using HTTPS/TLS, which is transport
layer security. Regardless of which
storage class you choose, there are several ways to
bring data into Cloud storage. Many customers simply carry out their own online transfer
using Cloud storage, which is the Cloud storage
command from the Cloud SDK. Data can also be moved in by using a Dragon Drop option in the Cloud console if accessed through the
Google Chrome web browser, but what if you have
to upload terabytes or even petabytes of data? Storage transfer service enables you to import large amounts of online data into Cloud storage quickly and cost effectively. The storage transfer
service let you schedule and manage
batch transfers to cloud storage from
another Cloud provider from a different
cloud storage region, or from an HTTPS endpoint. Then there is the
transfer appliance, which is a rackable, high capacity storage server that you lease
from Google Cloud. You 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. You can transfer
up to a petabyte of data on a single appliance. Cloud storage is
tight integration with other Google
Cloud products and services means that there are many additional ways to
move data into the service. For example, you can import and export tables to and from
both BigQuery and Cloud SQL. You can also store
app engine logs, files for backups, and objects used by app engine
applications like images. Cloud storage can also store
instance start up scripts, compute engine images, and objects used by compute
engine applications.