Object Storage: One Idea, Four Names (S3, Blob, GCS, Spaces)

Why this matters

Object storage is the workhorse of the cloud — it is where logs, backups, ML datasets, static assets, and user uploads land. The concept is identical across providers (buckets of immutable blobs addressed by key), but the defaults around encryption, versioning, public access, and consistency differ in ways that bite you on day two. Learning the four side by side is a once-and-done investment.

Demo

Create a bucket, upload a file, and list it on each cloud with the same handful of CLI commands.

Try it yourself

1. Create a bucket on at least two of the four clouds, upload hello.txt, and confirm the head-object/describe call shows server-side encryption is on by default.
2. Try to make the bucket publicly readable on AWS without disabling Block Public Access first — observe that the operation is refused, and read the error message carefully.
3. Compare the default storage classes (S3 Standard vs Azure Hot vs GCS Standard) and identify the cheapest cold-storage class on each — write down the price-per-GB-month for each.

References

• Amazon S3 — User Guide
• Google Cloud Storage — Bucket overview