I was lucky enough to get a developer invitation from Google a couple of months ago to preview and beta test their Google Storage for Developers service. This was before Google offered their free 5GB trial to the general public. I was given a 1 year 100 GB free storage plan and I only had to pay for the requests. Google Storage is pretty simple concept, essentially all it does is stored application data on “Google’s cloud”. Which according to Google, it’s stored on the same infrastructure that Google runs on. The very first thing that came to my mind when I heard of such service, is that Google is now trying to make a challenge to Amazon Web Service’s S3 service. However unlike Amazon’s S3, I find Google’s service to be far less cumbersome and really easy to work with. To start, Google provides a very usefull Python command line application called gsutil. With gsutil you can pretty much do anything you would do with their web based control panel. As a *nix geek, this is what sold me to this service.

At the moment, I’m currently using Google Storage just to backup my Bash, PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python scripts and other important config files. (It can’t get any easier with gsutil and cron)

Given it’s access control features, I’m sure I’ll eventually will have more use to it besides offsite backup storage.

Also, since I was an early adopter of this cool technology, I’m the owner of the “rubyninja”, “alpha01” and “baltazar” buckets on Google Storage’s top level namespace :-) .