GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question 7: Cloud Storage Archive Class
Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer · Test 1 · question 7 of 10
A regulated business must retain seven years of transaction records in Cloud Storage. Auditors expect to read a small subset of the objects at most once a year, and when they do, the data must be available in milliseconds without a restore step. Storage cost over the seven years should be as low as possible.
Which storage class should you choose for these objects?
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Answer:
Archive is the lowest-cost Cloud Storage class and is designed precisely for data you expect to access less than once a year, such as long-term regulatory retention. It has a 365-day minimum storage duration, which the seven-year retention comfortably exceeds, so no early-deletion charges apply. Unlike offline tape-style archives, Archive objects are available with the same millisecond-latency API as any other class; there is no thaw or restore delay.
Option B, Coldline, targets data read or modified at most about once a quarter and has a 90-day minimum duration. It works, but its per-gigabyte storage price is higher than Archive's, so it fails the "as low as possible" requirement.
Option C, Nearline, is for data accessed roughly once a month with a 30-day minimum duration. It is even more expensive to store than Coldline, and the access pattern described is far colder than Nearline is priced for.
Option D keeps the data in the most expensive class for storage. Autoclass will eventually move untouched objects toward colder classes, but it adds a per-object management fee and is aimed at workloads whose access patterns are unknown or unpredictable; here the pattern is known up front, so choosing Archive directly is both simpler and cheaper.
Reference: Storage classes