GCP Storage (stub)

Status: stub. Production depth pending.

In scope

Quick start

# Create bucket in SA region, uniform access, default encryption
gcloud storage buckets create gs://my-raw-uploads \
  --location africa-south1 \
  --uniform-bucket-level-access \
  --public-access-prevention

# Lifecycle: auto-move objects >30d to Nearline, >365d to Coldline
gcloud storage buckets update gs://my-raw-uploads \
  --lifecycle-file=lifecycle.json

# Signed URL (V4) for time-limited client upload (skip your server)
gcloud storage sign-url gs://my-raw-uploads/incoming/file.pdf \
  --duration=1h --http-verb=PUT

Storage classes

Retrieval costs grow as classes get colder. Lifecycle rules auto-transition.

Gotchas (high-level)

• gs://bucket-name must be globally unique across all GCP projects.
• Uniform bucket-level access disables per-object ACLs — use IAM only. Enable this at creation; retrofit is painful.
• Signed URLs expire at the absolute time, not "on next request" — clock skew matters.
• us-east1 buckets can't be accessed from us-east4 without egress costs. Same-region compute + storage is essential.

See Also

• GCP parent
• AWS storage sibling (S3/EBS/EFS)
• Cloudflare R2 (zero-egress alternative)