Hello Cloud Gurus,
I read the storage classes document but Storage Classes (Nearline vs Coldline) are confusing to me. What I understand is that coldline is used for data accessed once a year and Nearline is best for data accessed once a month. I believe the only penalty to access coldline data more frequently is the Data Retrievel cost ? Is there any limitation of using nearline vs coldline classes like minimal storage tenure, minimum access requirement. What are the things to consider in these scenarios?
3 Answers
Nearline Storage has a 30-day minimum storage duration
Coldline Storage has a 90-day minimum storage duration.
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes
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Spend a few minutes playing with the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to see how different storage scenarios play out. Use some large numbers like 100TB and many millions of operations. You can visually see how data retrieval can get very expensive depending on your storage class.
I did try to price them in the pricing calculator and here is what I got. So I am retrieving 20GB data with 20 million class A and class B operations and still Cold Line comes significantly cheaper. First off I am trying to find what class A and class B is but if it has to do with data retrieval then it does not make sense. Coldline is meant for cold data that should not be accessed frequently. I thought its gonna be higher if I access it more frequently is that not the case ?
Cloud Storage Nearline
Iowa
Total Amount of Storage: 1,024,000 GB
Data Retrieval Size: 20 GB
Class A operations: 20 million
Class B operations: 20 million
USD 10,460.20
Cloud Storage Coldline
Iowa
Total Amount of Storage: 1,024,000 GB
Data Retrieval Size: 20 GB
Class A operations: 20 million
Class B operations: 20 million
USD 4,397.000
BTW, good job so clearly describing what you did, here! 👍 This made it so much easier to figure out what was blocking you. 🙂
Kudos to both of you (Ben and Asad) on an excellent discussion so far! 👍 Asad, I think the one thing you’re missing now is the volume of retrievals.
If you are only retrieving 20 GB per month of the 1,024,000 GB of data you have stored, that ~0.002% retrieval rate averages out to retrieving objects "once every 4267 years". So you are still very much in the "Coldline is less expensive" range. 🙃
But try a retrieval rate of "twice a month", instead–so punch in 2,048,000 GB retrieved per month, with still 1,024,000 GB stored. Then you will see that Coldline becomes wildly more expensive.
I hope this helps!
Mattias
Like always. Thank you very much. I appreciate your response. Also Thank you Ben for your valuable feedback.
Like always, happy to help! 🙂
Thanks. Per yout recommedation I played with the pricing calculator but still my could not get a good answer. I am still confused.