Google updates Cloud Storage with auto-deletion policies, regional buckets, and faster uploads

Google today announced three new features for Google Cloud Storage that it believes will make it easier for developers to manage objects, as well as more quickly access and upload data. The additions include Object Lifecycle Management, Regional Buckets, and automatic parallel composite uploads via gsutil, all of which are available now.

Object Lifecycle Management means developers can now configure auto-deletion policies for their objects, meaning objects can be automatically deleted based on certain conditions (say, all objects older than 365 days or all but the three most recent versions). Expected expiration time is added to object metadata when possible and all operations are logged in the access log. In short, Object Lifecycle Management can be used with Object Versioning to limit the number of older versions of your objects that are retained, while still keeping apps cost-efficient and maintaining a level of protection against accidental data loss.

Regional Buckets refer to granular location specifications that keep developers’ data near their computation: they can co-locate their Durable Reduced Availability data in the same region as their Google Compute Engine instances. This can reduce latency and increase bandwidth to virtual machines, which can be particularly useful for data-intensive computations. In other cases where content distribution is important, developers can of course still specify the less-granular United States or European datacenter locations.

Last but not least, gsutil version 3.34 automatically uploads large objects in parallel for higher throughput using multiple connections. The support is built using Composite Objects and works out-of-the-box: simply use ‘gsutil cp’ as before.

“If you’re managing temporary or versioned objects, running compute jobs over Cloud Storage data, or using gsutil to upload data, you’ll want to take advantage of these features right away,” Google says. More details on these updates are available on Google Docs: Object Lifecycle Management, Regional Buckets, and gsutil.

See also – Google debuts four-tiered 24/7 support for its cloud platform services, prices start at $0 to $400 per month and Google Cloud Messaging now supports persistent connections, upstream messaging, and notification sync

Top Image Credit: Pawel Kryj