If you're storing an image Blob in App Engine, should you put it in the Blobstore or Google Cloud Storage?

Question

Google Cloud Storage seems more cost effective than the App Engine Blobstore.

At the moment I am storing user-uploaded image files as Blob type fields in the Datastore (App Engine Java API, by the way).

But I'm debating whether to switch to either the Blobstore or Google Cloud Storage to permit image sizes greater than 1MB.

Google Cloud Storage seems more cost-effective than Blobstore. Which one would be better for storing large images?

Answer 1

The Blobstore is tightly integrated with App Engine, while Cloud Storage is offered stand-alone. Otherwise, they look like different interfaces to the same basic service.

I don't see any good technical reason for them to be priced differently; perhaps it's a marketing thing.

The Blobstore has a more mature API and does some neat stuff like making thumbnails on the fly without incurring extra storage. The Cloud Storage API is experimental and rapidly changing. They're both perfectly capable of storing large images. To choose, you'll need to decide if the Blobstore's more rubust API justifies the nominally higher cost.