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Google Cloud Storage for backups

King of the Hill Challenge

Article from ADMIN 53/2019

By Thomas Drilling

We compare Google Cloud Storage for Internet-based backups with Amazon S3.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is considered the mother of all object memories and, thanks to its great durability, availability, and built-in scaling, has been virtually unrivalled thus far. However, other providers now also offer S3 alternatives with interesting features. Like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is an object storage service for storing and retrieving data from anywhere on the Internet with a REST-flavored API (AWS S3 historically also supports SOAP and BitTorrent) or with a program based on one of the supported SDKs. In fact, GCS buckets and objects are conceptually similar to those in Amazon Web Services (AWS). As with AWS, anything you want to store in GCS must be dropped into buckets, which both organize data and control access.

Deployment Scenarios

Google Cloud Storage supports a wide range of use cases. With GCS, users can store content such as text files, images, videos, and more over the Internet. GCS also supports hosting of static website content, while also offering all the benefits of a highly scalable architecture. For example, if you experience web request load peaks (e.g., because many users are trying to read a popular post or download a coupon code), the system can automatically process the increasing load volume without manual intervention.

Google Cloud Storage also helps IT managers develop and operate serverless applications – for example, by executing tasks in response to events in GCS. Each time a file is uploaded, a format checker or conversion tool could launch, triggered by Google Functions. Finally, GCS can be used for cloud-based backups and for archiving data that is rarely accessed. Unlike Amazon S3, however, GCS lets you recover the archived data within milliseconds, instead of minutes – or hours in the case of AWS Glacier.