Storage
- Fundamental characteristics of an effective cloud storage service:
- Security (encryption at rest and in transit)
- Durability (practically no data loss)
- Availability
- Use cases:
- Compliance and business continuity
- Data lakes
- Applications: (Static files – multimedia)
- Storage Types
- object:
- Binary objects (files) and unstructured data such as media, documents, logs, backup,….
- Each object have an ID, metadata, attributes and actual data
- block
- Virtual Disks with a filesystem
- filestore
- This is a shared filesystem which can be accessed by multiple vms at once
- This is a shared filesystem which can be accessed by multiple vms at once
- object:
Block Storage in GCP
- GCP offers two types of Block Storage Options
- Local Disk: They are ephemeral in nature so, the data will be erased once we stop the vm
- Persistent Disk: Can exist even after the vm is deleted
- This is disk as a service
| Feature | Local SSD | Persistent Disk |
|---|---|---|
| Persistence | Ephemeral (data lost when vm stops) | Persistent across vm restarts and reboots |
| Performance | Extremely high IOPS, low latency | Lower IOPS but more scalable |
| Capacity | 375 GB Increments max 9 TB per VM | Can be resized upto 64 TB per disk |
| Use case | High performance, temporary storage | General purpose durable storage |
| Data Durability | No redundancy or backup | Replicated and Backed up |
Persistent Disks (PD)
- This is main block storage
- This can be attach to the Compute Engine VM as either a boot disk or additional data disk
- PD provides automatic redundancy to protect your data from hardware failures
- Disk Types: Refer Here and Refer Here for persistent disk types
- Standard PD: Cost effective, high capacity storage sutiable for work loads with lower IOPS needs
- SSD Persistent Disks: High Performace storage suidtable for I/O Intensive workloads like databases or HPC
- Balance PD: A balance between performance and cost for general workloads
- Performance (SSD) persistent disks
- Extreme persistent disks
- Zonal disks and Regional disks:
- Zonal Disks are attached to the vm in a single zone
- Regional disks provide synchronous replication of data across zones within the same region offering higher availability
- Snapshots: PDs backup is referred as snapshots which allow you take backup and restore disk. Snapshots are incremental (only changes since the last snapshot are stored)
- Dynamic Resizing: you can dynamically resize persisten disk to increase storage size without restarting vm
