Ch-2. GCP Tech-Stack - Storage services

Google Cloud offers 9 storage and database options namely:

1. Cloud Storage
2. Cloud SQL
3. Cloud Spanner
4. Cloud Datastore
5. Cloud Bigtable
6. Persistent Disk
7. Cloud Firestore (Firestore & Filestore are both two different types)
8. Google Cloud Filestore
9. BigQuery

1.) Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage is the object storage service offered by Google Cloud. It provides some interesting features such as object versioning or fine-grain permissions (per object or bucket), that can make development easy and help reduce operational overheads. It also serves as the foundation of several different services.

Key Features

1. Scalability: Google Cloud Storage is designed to scale to meet your needs, whether you need to store a few gigabytes or petabytes of data. You can easily increase or decrease your storage capacity as needed, and pay only for what you use.
2. Durability: Google Cloud Storage is designed to be highly durable, with multiple copies of your data stored across different locations for redundancy. It offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability, meaning that your data is protected against data loss due to hardware failures, natural disasters, or other issues.
3. Security: Google Cloud Storage offers several security features to help protect your data, including encryption at rest and in transit, access control lists, signed URLs, and more. You can also integrate with other Google Cloud services like Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage access to your data.
4. Flexibility: Google Cloud Storage offers four different storage classes – Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive – to suit different use cases and data access needs. You can also use Google Cloud Storage for backup and disaster recovery, content delivery, and more.
5. Integrations: Google Cloud Storage integrates with other Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Cloud Functions, and Compute Engine, as well as third-party tools and services like Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Splunk.

2.) Cloud Firestore

Cloud Firestore is a flexible, scalable database for mobile, web, and server development from Firebase and Google Cloud. Like Firebase Realtime Database, it keeps the data in-sync across client apps through real-time listeners and offers offline support for mobile and web so users can build responsive apps that work regardless of network latency or Internet connectivity.

3.) Google Cloud Filestore

Google Cloud Filestore is widely used when it comes to performing heavy machine learning tasks, media processing, rendering, etc due to the high throughput it is highly preferred. It is generally not considered as a storage option, but a temporary drive for performing high read intensive tasks.

Key Features

• It offers low latency for file operations.
• It is a fully managed, NoOps service that is integrated with the rest of the Google Cloud portfolio.
• Users can scale file storage elastically to suit the evolving needs of their business.
• Supports storage of unstructured objects, transactions, and SQL-like queries.

4.) Persistent Disk

Persistent disks are durable network storage devices that the instances can access like physical disks on a desktop or a server. The data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical disks. The physical disks and the data distribution are managed by the Compute Engine to ensure redundancy and optimal performance.

Key Features

• It has built-in redundancy to protect the data against equipment failure
• It ensures data availability through datacenter maintenance events.
• Performance is predictable
• It scales linearly with provisioned capacity until the limits for an instance’s provisioned vCPUs are reached.

5.) Cloud SQL

Cloud SQL is a fully-managed database service that helps in setting up, maintain, manage, and administer relational databases on the Google Cloud Platform.

Key Features

• Google Storage Cloud SQL offers MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as a service.
• Automatic replication
• Managed backups
• It facilitates Vertical & Horizontal scaling

6.) Cloud Spanner

Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, mission-critical, relational database service. It offers transactional consistency at a global scale, schemas, SQL, and automatic, synchronous replication for high availability.

Key Features

• Regional and multiregional configurations
• Built on Google Cloud Network
• Provides on-demand backup and restore for data protection
• It supports multiple languages like C#, C++, Java, Python, etc.

7.) Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Bigtable is Google’s NoSQL Big Data database service. It is the same database powering many Google services, like Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Key Features

• Provides high throughput with low latency
• Write data once and automatically replicate where needed with eventual consistency
• It helps in executing machine learning algorithms on the data

8.) Cloud Datastore

Cloud Datastore is a highly-scalable NoSQL database. It uses a distributed architecture to automatically manage scaling. The queries scale with the size of the result set and not the size of the data set.

Key Features

• Supports Automatic Transactions
• High availability of reads and writes.
• Flexible storage and querying of data
• Massive scalability with high performance
• It is a fully managed service with no planned downtime.

9.) BigQuery

Key Features

• It enables data scientists and data analysts to build and operationalize ML models on structured or semi-structured data, directly inside BigQuery.
• It allows users to analyze data across clouds using standard SQL.
• Its high-speed streaming insertion API provides a powerful foundation for real-time analytics, making the latest business data immediately available for analysis.
• BigQuery automatically replicates data and keeps a seven-day history of changes, allowing users to easily restore and compare data from different times.