Google Blobstore and Google Cloud Storage

Question

We have an application hosted on the Google application engine for Java, and we have a requirement where we want to store somewhere blood donation certificates of appreciation ( html files).

So we can use Google Blobstore or Google Cloud Storage. I know that both of these solutions can be made using Gae for Java

However, the problem for us is to decide which one to use. What are the pros and cons of these two approaches?

We are non-profit and cannot pay much.

Answer 1

Better to use Blobstore. The service is provided free of charge at 5 GB (as of March 2012). Cloud storage is a paid service. The Blobstore App Engine is similar to Amazon S3, but less flexible. It has an HTTP-based API and Java / Python APIs (see http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/blobstore/overview.html ).

Answer 2

If you are starting a new project, I would go with cloud storage.

It looks like Google is pushing its Cloud Storage platform harder than the blobstore platform. For example, programmatically writing files to blobstore is deprecated , but Cloud storage is supported . I cannot read the future, but I would argue that Google will depreciate more and more of the blobstore API in favor of the Cloud Storage API, which will lead to headaches in the future.

UPDATE : a program entry in blobstore is no longer supported, but fully supported by the application engine. Alternatively, you can use the blobstore API and still use Cloud Storage as the backend. At this point, it is clear that Cloud Storage will survive the blobstore.

UPDATE 2017 : Google's official recommendation is now cloud storage, not blobstore. This is called 4 years in advance.

Answer 3

First, I would say that if your HTML file is small (or can be small using gzip compression), just save it as a BlobProperty in the data store and add metadata properties so that you can restore it later accordingly.

If this is not an option, then perhaps consider the future growth of your application. Two great things Cloud Storage over Blobstore: 1) the availability of third-party manufacturers and 2) the absence of restrictions on file size.

• Do other services need to read or write these files? Then use Cloud Storage.
• Perhaps your files will exceed 50 MB? Or may their sizes be unknown? Then use Cloud Storage.

If, however, you KNOW that these two things should never be addressed to your application, then just stick to Blobstore.