Storage solutions
There are a number of storage solutions available on Compute Engine, including boot disks, persistent disks, local SSDs, and external storage solutions such as Cloud Storage and managed databases. Each of these solutions serve to fulfil different needs, and each solution has a number of caveats and limitations.
Persistent disks
When working in cloud environments such as Compute Engine, there are several considerations that need to be made when it comes to disk storage. Virtual machines may be easily recreated, but that isn't always the case with data. To provide the same level of flexibility and availability for storage that Google brings to VMs, Compute Engine offers persistent disks as a block storage solution.
Persistent disks are network attached drives that have been engineered to provide extremely consistent IO performance within Google's datacenters. These disks are available in both standard platter and SSD, and Compute Engine provides a number of methods to act on...