Key terms


For an introduction to using Cloud Storage, see the Quickstart Using the Console.







Bucket names

Bucket names have more restrictions than object names and must be globally unique, because every bucket resides in a single Cloud Storage namespace. Also, bucket names can be used with a CNAME redirect, which means they need to conform to DNS naming conventions. For more information, see the bucket naming guidelines.

Bucket labels

Bucket labels are key:value metadata pairs that allow you to group your buckets along with other Google Cloud Platform resources such as virtual machine instances and persistent disks. For example, you can use labels to create a team key that has values alpha, beta, and delta, and apply the team:alpha, team:beta, and team:delta labels to different buckets in order to indicate which team is associated with those buckets.


  • Keys and values cannot be longer than 63 characters each.
  • Label keys cannot be empty.





Object names

An object's name is treated as a piece of object metadata in Cloud Storage. Object names can contain any combination of Unicode characters (UTF-8 encoded) and must be less than 1024 bytes in length.

A common character to include in object names is a slash (/). By using slashes, you can make objects appear as though they're stored in a hierarchical structure. For example, you could name one object /europe/france/paris.jpg and another object /europe/france/cannes.jpg. When you list these objects, they appear to be in a hierarchical directory structure based on location; however, Cloud Storage sees the objects as independent with no hierarchical relationship whatsoever.


Object versions and generation numbers

An object in Cloud Storage can have different versions: by default, when you overwrite an object, Cloud Storage deletes the old version and replaces it with a new version. When you enable Object Versioning on your bucket, older versions remain in your bucket when an overwrite or deletion occurs.

Each object version is uniquely identified by its generation number, found in the object's metadata. When Object Versioning has created an older version of an object, you can use the generation number to refer to the older version. This allows you to restore an overwritten object in your bucket, or permanently delete older object versions that you no longer need. Generation numbers are also used when you include preconditions in your requests.


A resource is an entity within Google Cloud Platform. Each project, bucket, and object in Google Cloud Platform is a resource, as are things such as Compute Engine instances.

Resource names

Each resource has a unique name that identifies it, much like a filename. Buckets have a resource name in the form of projects/_/buckets/[BUCKET_NAME], where [BUCKET_NAME] is the ID of the bucket. Objects have a resource name in the form of projects/_/buckets/[BUCKET_NAME]/objects/[OBJECT_NAME], where [OBJECT_NAME] is the ID of the object.






Data opacity


Object immutability

Objects are immutable, which means that an uploaded object cannot change throughout its storage lifetime. An object's storage lifetime is the time between successful object creation (upload) and successful object deletion. In practice, this means that you cannot make incremental changes to objects, such as append operations or truncate operations. However, it is possible to overwrite objects that are stored in Cloud Storage, and doing so happens atomically — until the new upload completes the old version of the object will be served to readers, and after the upload completes the new version of the object will be served to readers. So a single overwrite operation simply marks the end of one immutable object's lifetime and the beginning of a new immutable object's lifetime.


You should retry failed requests using truncated exponential backoff.


Cloud Storage uses a flat namespace to store objects. However, some tools (for example, Google Cloud Platform Console and gsutil) can work with objects as if they are stored in a virtual hierarchy, as a convenience.


There is only one Cloud Storage namespace, which means every bucket must have a unique name across the entire Cloud Storage namespace. Object names must be unique only within a given bucket.

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