Cloud Storage — classes and locations

1. The five classes

Class	API name	Minimum storage duration	Retrieval fee	Stated availability
Rapid	`RAPID`	none	no	>99.95% (zones)
Standard	`STANDARD`	none	no	>99.99% multi/dual-region; 99.99% region
Nearline	`NEARLINE`	30 days	yes	99.95% multi/dual; 99.9% region
Coldline	`COLDLINE`	90 days	yes	99.95% multi/dual; 99.9% region
Archive	`ARCHIVE`	365 days	yes	99.95% multi/dual; 99.9% region

STANDARD is what you get if you specify nothing.

The 365 days is the number to carry into any estimate. It is Cloud Storage's longest commitment and it is twice the equivalent commitment on either of the other two major clouds — see guides/parity/storage.md §2, which is the one parity row most likely to change an archive design.

2. Minimum storage duration is a billing commitment, not a retention lock

The object can be deleted whenever you like. The charge is the commitment. So a lifecycle rule that moves objects to ARCHIVE and a retention policy that deletes them after six months are, together, a bill for twelve months of archive storage on data you no longer have. Check the lifecycle rule against the class's minimum duration before you ship it, in both directions.

3. Four location types, and one that is class-restricted

Location type	What it means
zone	zonal — `RAPID` storage only
region	one region
dual-region	two geographically separate locations
multi-region	geographically dispersed, worldwide

Two readings:

RAPID is the only class that can be zonal, so "zonal object storage" and "a cheap archive" are not

combinable choices;

dual-region and multi-region are location types of the bucket, not replication you configure afterwards.

A bucket's location is fixed at creation in the model this page describes, which makes it one more create-time decision to get right (the same family as Cloud KMS's, see reference/identity/secret-manager-and-kms.md §2).

4. The class is per object, and a bucket default is only a default

"A storage class is a piece of metadata that is used by every object"

And: changing a bucket's default storage class does not affect existing objects. This is the fact that makes "we switched the bucket to Coldline" a false economy claim — it applies to new objects only. Existing objects move when a lifecycle rule or an explicit rewrite moves them, and each move is itself a billable operation.

5. What this document does not say

No prices, and no adjustable quota values — reference/overview/quotas-and-limits-model.md explains why and names the call. The retrieval-fee column records that a fee exists, which is the design-bearing fact; the amount is a live value.

Next: reference/storage/cloud-storage-access-control.md (the single most consequential setting on a bucket), reference/storage/errors.md (the JSON API reason strings), guides/parity/storage.md.