storage library

This library provides access to Google Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Storage is an object store for binary objects. Each object has a set of metadata attached to it. For more information on Google Cloud Storage see https://developers.google.com/storage/.

There are two main concepts in Google Cloud Storage: Buckets and Objects. A bucket is a container for objects and objects are the actual binary objects.

The API has two main classes for dealing with buckets and objects.

The class Storage is the main API class providing access to working with buckets. This is the 'bucket service' interface.

The class Bucket provide access to working with objects in a specific bucket. This is the 'object service' interface.

Both buckets have objects, have names. The bucket namespace is flat and global across all projects. This means that a bucket is always addressable using its name without requiring further context.

Within buckets the object namespace is also flat. Object are not organized hierarchical. However, as object names allow the slash / character this is often used to simulate a hierarchical structure based on common prefixes.

This package uses relative and absolute names to refer to objects. A relative name is just the object name within a bucket, and requires the context of a bucket to be used. A relative name just looks like this:

object_name

An absolute name includes the bucket name and uses the gs:// prefix also used by the gsutil tool. An absolute name looks like this.

gs://bucket_name/object_name

In most cases relative names are used. Absolute names are typically only used for operations involving objects in different buckets.

For most of the APIs in ths library which take instances of other classes from this library it is the assumption that the actual implementations provided here are used.