About service tiers

This page describes the service tiers that Filestore offers and provides guidance on selecting the tier that best suits your needs.

Filestore offers the following primary service tiers:

  • Zonal: Optimized for high performance computing (HPC) and localized workloads.
  • Regional: Designed for regional availability and resilience against zone outages.
  • Multishares for GKE (Enterprise): Specifically optimized for GKE workloads requiring high availability and multiple shares.

Filestore also supports legacy tiers for purposes such as automation backward compatibility or specific cost and performance requirements:

  • Basic HDD
  • Basic SSD

For more information on Basic service tiers, see Filestore legacy service tiers.

Tier comparison

Each tier offers different capacity options and performance levels to fit different use cases.

Service tier Provisionable capacity Scalability Performance Availability Protocol Data protection
Zonal 1 TiB to 9.75 TiB Up or down in 256 GiB units Configurable Zonal NFSv3, NFSv4.1 Backups
Snapshots
Replication
Zonal 10 TiB to 100 TiB Up or down in 2.5 TiB units Configurable Zonal NFSv3, NFSv4.1 Backups
Snapshots
Replication
Regional 100 GiB to 9.75 TiB* Up or down in 1 GiB or 256 GiB units* Configurable Regional NFSv3, NFSv4.1 Backups
Snapshots
Replication
Regional 10 TiB to 100 TiB Up or down in 2.5 TiB units Configurable Regional NFSv3, NFSv4.1 Backups
Snapshots
Replication
Multishares for GKE (Enterprise) 1 TiB to 10 TiB Up or down in 256 GiB units Scales with capacity Regional NFSv3, NFSv4.1 Backups
Snapshots
Replication
Basic HDD (on GKE)** 100 GiB to 63.9 TiB Up only in 1 GiB units Standard fixed Zonal NFSv3 Backups
Basic HDD 1 TiB to 63.9 TiB Up only in 1 GiB units Standard fixed Zonal NFSv3 Backups
Basic SSD 2.5 TiB to 63.9 TiB Up only in 1 GiB units Premium fixed Zonal NFSv3 Backups

* If small capacity instances are available in the region where your instance is located, Regional instance capacity ranges from 100 GiB to 10,239 GiB. Otherwise, the range is 1 TiB to 9.75 TiB. For more information, see Small capacity instances.

** Basic HDD on GKE refers to basic HDD instances with a minimum capacity of 100 GiB provisioned with the Filestore CSI driver. Basic HDD on GKE instances with capacity lower than 1 TiB consume 1 TiB of quota.

Small capacity instances

Filestore Regional instances with capacity lower than 1024 GiB are a good option when you need a smaller instance for your application and expand it in time. For example, you can use small instances for development purposes, testing, and for applications with low traffic or basic storage needs.

The following table provides a comparison between the capacity ranges for Regional instances based on the region where the instance was created.

Supported regions Unsupported regions
Lower capacity range
  • 100 GiB to 10,239 GiB (approximately 0.097 TiB to 9.99 TiB)
  • Capacity increment: 1 GiB
  • IOPS increment: 100
  • 1 TiB to 9.75 TiB
  • Capacity increment: 256 GiB
  • IOPS increment: 100
Higher capacity range
  • 10 TiB to 100 TiB
  • Capacity increment: 2.5 TiB
  • IOPS increment: 1,000
  • 10 TiB to 100 TiB
  • Capacity increment: 2.5 TiB
  • IOPS increment: 1,000

If you want to create a Regional instance that has capacity lower than 1024 GiB, the following rules apply:

  • You must use custom performance to define the performance settings.

  • You can set custom performance using a fixed IOPS rate or an IOPS per TiB ratio.

    • For fixed IOPS rate, you can set a specific number of IOPS, not lower than 2,000.
    • For IOPS per TiB ratio, you can set the ratio value that falls between 4,000 and 17,000. The calculated number of IOPS can't be lower than 2,000.

For more information about custom performance settings, see Configure performance.

Availability of small instances

The small capacity Filestore instances feature is available in the us-central1 and us-east4 regions for the Regional service tier. If you choose a different region for your instance, the instance capacity starts at 1 TiB.

Pricing

For detailed information about pricing for each service tier, see the Pricing page.

Quota

A Filestore project's storage capacity and instance quota are influenced by the region and service tier you choose.

To see your available quota, go to the Quotas & Limits page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to Quotas & Limits

If you need to request additional quota, see Requesting quota increases.

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