Summary

This chapter explored various ways that data can be stored in Google Cloud. Let’s summarize what we have learned about storage.

For large amounts of unstructured data, we could use Google Cloud Storage. Applications installed inside Compute Engine VM will benefit greatly from performant local or persistent drives. If files need to be shared between users over a network, Filestore will be the best fit. If data that we store for an application is structured and can be organized in tables, relational databases such as Cloud SQL or Spanner will make a good choice, with Spanner being able to scale horizontally better. If the data is not relational but of the key-value type, Cloud Bigtable is a perfect use case. Firestore is the best fit if you are looking for a document database for mobile applications. BigQuery would be the best for analyzing large amounts of unchanged data.

Please refer to the following diagram, which will hopefully assist you in identifying the differences...