Creating Default Google Cloud Storage Bucket

Sep 13, 2015

2016-12-17 This post no longer applies. It seems that the transition to the Google Cloud Platform Dashboard for Cloud Storage is complete. You can directly create a new bucket using the new interface.

2015-12-08 Google has deprecated the App Engine dashboard and this will no longer work for new users.

Recently I deployed a Golang app to Google App Engine. This app was relatively simple. You make a request to http://rule110-go.appspot.com/image/{n} with a integer for {n} and you are returned an image of the n-th iteration of Rule 110. For large inputs of n, computing each row is expensive. Generating the image is also expensive. I wanted to cache images to Google Cloud Storage to avoid duplicated computation.

Herein lies the problem that I faced and solved. I couldn’t create a bucket. This was confusing. When I looked under Compute > App Engine > Quota details in the dashboard, it was clear that I should have 5 GB of Google Cloud Storage along with associated operations on said storage.

However, when I go to Storage > Cloud Storage > Browser it asks me to sign up for the 60 day trial. If I’m given free storage, why do I have to give my credit card information for a trial‽ Google also seems to have removed most of the information on how you can use the free storage.

The answer I found was to use the old App Engine dashboard at http://appengine.google.com. It was simple. I clicked into my application, then Administration > Application Settings. At the bottom clicked Create under Cloud Integrations and made a default bucket. Once the bucket was created, I was able to see it in the new Google Developers Console. I still wasn’t be able to upload files or create folders through the new interface, but https://console.developers.google.com/storage/browser/{bucket-name}/ worked for me. The more important thing was that I was able to use the go client libraries now to interact with the bucket.

Hope this has helped.