Cloud Storage — Object storage
Buckets of files (images, backups, logs, static assets) accessible via URL or API. Cheap, infinitely scalable, not a filesystem.
is Google's equivalent of a giant shared Google Drive — but for your apps, not for humans clicking through folders. You create a , you drop files (they're called 'objects'), and each one gets a URL.
Use cases: user uploads (profile pictures, documents), app static assets (CSS, JS, images), database backups, big log archives, raw data for analytics. Anything that's a 'file'.
It's not a filesystem. You can't mount it like a disk and do 'cd folder'. You read/write whole objects via HTTP or SDK. This sounds limiting, but it means infinite scale and 11 9's of durability (99.999999999%).
Storage classes let you trade cost for access speed: Standard (hot data, accessed daily), Nearline (monthly), Coldline (quarterly), Archive (yearly, cheapest but slow to restore). Lifecycle rules can auto-move old data to colder tiers.
Comparison: Cloud Storage = AWS S3 = Azure Blob Storage. The pattern is identical across clouds; buckets, objects, classes, lifecycle.
Grounded on https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/introduction
Next up
Cloud SQL — Managed relational databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQL Server run by Google: backups, high availability, upgrades, and patches handled for you.