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Standard Storage is appropriate for storing data that is frequently accessed, such as serving website content, interactive workloads, or data supporting mobile and gaming applications. For standard storage, the monthly cost is the only cost you need to plan for.
However, for the other three storage types, you’ll want to consider the minimum storage duration of that data, as well as any retrieval costs.
For example, Coldline Storage has a minimum storage duration of 90 days, and a retrieval cost of, say, two pennies. So the cheaper monthly cost is completely worth it if you only want to access this data twice a year.
If you find yourself accessing or updating the data every week, you’ll end up spending more money than if you had selected Standard Storage to begin with. So that’s something to consider when setting things up.
Network costs
When discussing network costs, we need to distinguish between egress and ingress:
- Egress represents data sent from Cloud Storage, like when reading data.
- Ingress represents data sent to Cloud Storage, like when writing data.
Important note: Network ingress is always free.
For network egress, there are three categories to consider:
First, when that network egress is moving or copying data to other Cloud Storage buckets, or when other Google Cloud services access that data. This is considered “network egress within Google Cloud” and is free within regions, such as reading data in a US-EAST1 bucket into a US BigQuery dataset. Pricing then applies for egress between regions or across continents.
Second, there’s “specialty network services,” which is when you use certain Google Cloud network products–such as Cloud CDN or Cloud Interconnect–egress pricing is based on their pricing tables.
All other egress is considered to be “general network usage” and is billed based upon which continent the data is traveling to.
Operations usage
An operation is an action that makes changes to, or retrieves information about buckets and objects in Cloud Storage. Operations are divided into three categories: Class A, Class B, and free. For a full list of the operations that fall into each class, check the documentation.
As a brief overview:
Class A includes creating storage buckets and objects.
Class B includes retrieving storage objects.
Free operations are primarily deletions.
Early retrieval and deletion fees
Because Nearline Storage, Coldline Storage, and Archive Storage are intended for storing infrequently accessed data, there are additional costs associated with retrieval, and minimum storage durations. But more about that in the documentation.
Closing out!
Stay tuned for more posts on making the most of Cloud Storage.
Learn more about your storage options in Cloud Storage Bytes. If you want to know more about pricing, check out the documentation for the most up to date information for your particular use case, more examples, and tutorials.
