Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is what you ought to use to store unstructured data such as images, videos, or other static content, as well as for backups, disaster recovery, and other cool or cold data. GCS stores data in the form of objects on an underlying distributed filesystem, called Colossus. Colossus is Google-proprietary and a very high-performance filesystem.

You can transfer data in or out of GCS using a command-line tool called gsutil (different from gcloud, which we've used for compute-related operations so far). Under the hood, gsutil makes RESTful API calls to the GCS service, so we can do the same and interact with GCS via the web console or client apps.

This chapter is meant to get you familiar with GCS and to give you an idea of where it would fit within with your overall infrastructure. We will be exploring the following:

• When it is appropriate to use GCS
• Fundamental concepts related to GCS
• Creating and managing GCS buckets
• The features available to manage data in GCS buckets