Can I delete default buckets on Google App Engine Storage?

Question

When I create a new application on Google Cloud App Engine, these buckets in Google Storage show up as well:

bucket_1: <region>.artifacts.<app_id>.appspot.com
bucket_2: staging.<app_id>.appspot.com
bucket_3: <app_id>.appspot.com

I've only added 300MB on bucket_3 and never added anything to bucket_1. Nonetheless, bucket_1 is currently occupying 3.9GB. Why do I need this bucket_1? Can I delete all its content or even delete the whole bucket?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

When you create a new App Engine Application, these buckets in Google Storage are created:

bucket_2: staging.<app_id>.appspot.com
bucket_3: <app_id>.appspot.com

Bucket bucket_1: <region>.artifacts.<app_id>.appspot.com is created when you run the command gcloud app deploy. This is the Container Registry bucket where App Engine stores container images. You can delete this bucket, however, next time when you deploy a new version gcloud app deploy the bucket will be recreated.

I did some testing on my side and observed that when you deploy your first app engine standard version, 48 images are created in us.artifacts.your-project.appspot.com/containers/images folder. From this moment, every time you deploy a new app engine version 3 more images are added to this folder. I am not sure about the internal implementation, but I think it caches the images in this folder.