A company wants to reduce costs for a Cloud Storage bucket that stores infrequently accessed archival data. The data is accessed roughly once a quarter. Which storage class should they use?
Trap 1: Archive storage class.
Archive storage class is unsuitable here because accessing data quarterly would incur substantial retrieval fees, negating its low storage cost benefits. While tempting due to the "archival data" description, this class is specifically optimised for data accessed less than once a year, or truly never, after initial write. It is the correct choice for long-term, deep archives where retrieval latency and cost are secondary to achieving the absolute lowest storage expenditure.
Trap 2: Nearline storage class.
Nearline storage class is for data accessed less than once a month, which is more frequent than quarterly access. It would have higher storage costs than Coldline for this use case.
Trap 3: Standard storage class.
Standard storage class is for frequently accessed data and has the highest storage cost, making it unsuitable for infrequently accessed archival data.
- A
Archive storage class.
Why wrong: Archive storage class is unsuitable here because accessing data quarterly would incur substantial retrieval fees, negating its low storage cost benefits. While tempting due to the "archival data" description, this class is specifically optimised for data accessed less than once a year, or truly never, after initial write. It is the correct choice for long-term, deep archives where retrieval latency and cost are secondary to achieving the absolute lowest storage expenditure.
- B
Nearline storage class.
Why wrong: Nearline storage class is for data accessed less than once a month, which is more frequent than quarterly access. It would have higher storage costs than Coldline for this use case.
- C
Standard storage class.
Why wrong: Standard storage class is for frequently accessed data and has the highest storage cost, making it unsuitable for infrequently accessed archival data.
- D
Coldline storage class.
Coldline storage class is specifically designed for data accessed less than once a quarter, matching the access pattern of roughly once a quarter. It provides a good balance of low storage cost and acceptable retrieval costs for this scenario.