Unstructured data storage
1. Unstructured data storage
Every application needs to store data, like media to be streamed or even sensor data from devices, and different applications and workloads require different storage solutions. Google Cloud offers several core storage products. This list includes Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Spanner, BigQuery, Firestore, and Bigtable. Depending on your use case, you might use one or several of these services to do the job. Let’s begin with Cloud Storage, which is a service that offers developers and IT organizations durable and highly available object storage. But what is object storage? Object storage is a computer data storage architecture that manages data as “objects” instead of as file storage, which is a file and folder hierarchy, or as block storage, which is chunks of a disk. These objects are stored in a packaged format that contains the binary form of the actual data, and relevant associated metadata–such as creation date, author, resource type, and permissions–and a globally unique identifier. These unique keys are in the form of URLs, which means object storage interacts well with web technologies. Data commonly stored as objects include video, pictures, and audio recordings. This type of data is referred to as unstructured, which means that it doesn’t have a predefined data model or isn’t organized in a predefined manner, as you might find in a structured database format. Cloud Storage lets customers store any amount of data and retrieve it as often as needed. It’s a fully managed, scalable service that has a wide variety of uses, such as serving website content, storing data for archival and disaster recovery, and distributing large data objects to end users through direct download. 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 option is best for storing infrequently accessed data, like reading or modifying data on average once a month or less. Examples might include data backups, long-tail 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 Nearline storage, Coldline storage is meant for reading or modifying data, at most, once every 90 days. And 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 and a 365-day minimum storage duration. Although each of these four classes have differences, it’s worth noting there are several characteristics that apply across all of these storage classes, which 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 APIs, 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 load-balancing traffic for optimal performance. Cloud Storage also provides a feature called Autoclass, which automatically transitions objects to appropriate storage classes based on each object's access pattern. The feature moves data that is not accessed to colder storage classes to reduce storage cost and moves data that is accessed to Standard storage to optimize future accesses. Autoclass simplifies and automates cost saving for your Cloud Storage data.2. Let's practice!
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