Google Cloud Storage is a RESTful online storage web service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 for storing and accessing your data on Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities. It is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), comparable to Amazon S3

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces...

 online storage service.

Feasibility

User activiation is resourced through the API Developer Console. Google Account holders must first access the service by logging in and then agreeing to the Terms of Service

Terms of Service

Terms of service are rules which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. Unless in violation of consumer protection laws, such terms are usually legally binding...

, followed by enabling a billing structure. As of May 21, 2011, the console is part of Google Labs

Google Labs

Google Labs was a page created by Google to demonstrate and test new Google projects. Google calls Google Labs,Google also uses an invitation-only phase for trusted testers to test projects including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Wave and many of these have their own "labs" webpages for...

, and is free up until a generous usage quota.

Design

Google Storage (GS) stores objects (originally limited to 100 GiB, currently up to 1 TiB) that are organized into buckets (as S3 does) identified within each bucket by a unique, user-assigned key. All requests are authorized using an access control list

Access control list

An access control list , with respect to a computer file system, is a list of permissions attached to an object. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects. Each entry in a typical ACL specifies a subject...

 associated with each bucket and object. Bucket names and keys are chosen so that objects are addressable using HTTP URL

Uniform Resource Locator

In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

s:

• http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/bucket/object
• http://bucket.commondatastorage.googleapis.com/object

Features

• Interoperability - Google Storage is interoperable with other cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon S3
  Amazon S3
  Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces...
  
   and Eucalyptus Systems
  Eucalyptus (computing)
  Eucalyptus is a software platform for the implementation of private cloud computing on computer clusters. There is an open-core enterprise edition and an open-source edition. Currently, it exports a user-facing interface that is compatible with the Amazon EC2 and S3 services but the platform is...
  
  .
• Consistency - Upload operations to Google Storage are atomic, providing strong read-after-write consistency for all upload operations.
• Access Control - Google Storage uses access control list
  Access control list
  An access control list , with respect to a computer file system, is a list of permissions attached to an object. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects. Each entry in a typical ACL specifies a subject...
  
  (ACLs) to manage object and bucket access. An ACL consists of one or more entries, each granting a specific permission to a scope. Permissions define what someone can do with an object or bucket (for example, READ or WRITE). Scopes define who the permission applies to. For example, a specific user or a group of users (such as Google account email addresses, Google Apps domain, public access, etc.)
• Resumable Uploads - Google Storage provides a resumable data transfer feature that allows to resume upload operations after a communication failure has interrupted the flow of data.

External links

• Official website
• Google Cloud Storage Discussion Group
• Intro to new Google cloud technologies: Google Storage, Prediction API, BigQuery slideshare presentation by Chris Schalk (Developer Advocate at Google)