Introduction to GCS and BigQuery
GCS is an object storage service. It’s a serverless service that is fully managed by GCP, which means we don’t need to think about any underlying infrastructure of GCS. For example, we don’t need to think about pre-sizing the storage, network bandwidth, number of nodes, or any other infrastructure-related stuff.
What is object storage? Object storage is a highly scalable data storage architecture that can store very large amounts of data in any format.
Because the technology can store data in almost any size and format, GCS is often used by developers to store large files, for example, images, videos, and large CSV data. But, from the data engineering perspective, we will often use GCS to store files, for example, as dump storage from databases, for exporting historical data from BigQuery, for storing machine learning model files, and for any other purpose related to storing files.
