Cloud Storage offers Rapid Bucket and Rapid Cache to help you
optimize data storage for high-performance use cases such as artificial
intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data-intensive analytics. This
document introduces these options and helps you select the option that best
fits the needs of your workloads.

## The Cloud Storage Rapid product family

Cloud Storage Rapid is a family of high-performance products in Cloud Storage
that are designed to clear data bottlenecks for your AI/ML and data analytics
workloads. As AI/ML models grow in complexity and datasets reach petabyte
scales, storage performance often becomes the primary bottleneck for expensive
GPU and TPU clusters. Cloud Storage Rapid leverages zonal architectures to bring
your data closer to your compute resources, helping your accelerators
stay saturated, reduce training times, and lower the total cost of ownership
(TCO) for your most demanding workloads.

Cloud Storage Rapid includes Rapid Bucket and Rapid Cache.

### Store data in the Rapid storage class by using Rapid Bucket

[Rapid Bucket](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/rapid/rapid-bucket) is a high-performance, zonal object storage solution that
lets you store data in the [Rapid storage class](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes#rapid) by defining a [zone](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/locations#location-z) as
a bucket's location. Rapid Bucket lets you colocate your data in the same
physical zone as your AI accelerators and helps you achieve the lowest latency
and highest throughput among other Cloud Storage product offerings.
Rapid Bucket delivers sub-millisecond latency, up to 15 TB/s of aggregate
throughput, and supports up to 20 million queries per second (QPS).

Rapid Bucket supports stateful, streaming object appends, allowing
applications to write data to existing objects in real-time. This capability
lets you avoid expensive object rewrites and enables immediate data visibility,
allowing consumer applications to read data as it's being written.

**Best used for**: training, checkpointing, and serving AI models that require
ultra low latency and high deterministic performance

**Use this option if**: you want dedicated high performance for both reads and
writes

To learn how to create zonal buckets with Rapid Bucket, see
[Create zonal buckets](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/rapid/create-zonal-buckets).

### Create zonal caches with Rapid Cache

[Rapid Cache](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/rapid/rapid-cache) is a fully managed, SSD-backed zonal read cache that
works with your existing regional, dual-region, or multi-region buckets without
requiring API changes. A cache gives you temporary storage capacity and
bandwidth that [automatically scale up or down](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/rapid/rapid-cache#size-bandwidth-autoscaling) according to the needs of
your workloads. Data is automatically ingested into the cache from your bucket
when the data is read by a VM that resides in the same zone as the cache.

Rapid Cache provides 2.5 TB/s of aggregate throughput and reduces latency
for faster reads by colocating your data in the same zones as your VMs.
In addition to serving data faster, data served from a cache can incur lower
data transfer fees, data retrieval fees, and operational fees than data that's
served directly from a bucket. For more information, see [Benefits](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/rapid/rapid-cache#benefits) for
Rapid Cache.

**Best used for**: training, checkpointing restores, and serving AI models that
require high read bandwidth from an existing Cloud Storage bucket

**Use this option if**: you have existing data storage in a Cloud Storage
bucket that you want to accelerate

To learn how to use Rapid Cache, see [Create and manage caches](https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/rapid/use-rapid-cache).