Rapid Cache

This page describes Rapid Cache, a feature that provides an SSD-backed zonal read cache for Cloud Storage buckets that can increase throughput and lower latency on your stored data. Rapid Cache provides storage capacity and bandwidth that automatically scale up or down to your needs. Rapid Cache is a fully managed service and returns consistent data.

Rapid Cache is helpful for improving read-heavy workload performance and reducing network costs. For more information, see Benefits.

See Create and manage caches to learn how to create and manage caches using Rapid Cache.

How does Rapid Cache work?

Rapid Cache lets you create caches in the same zone as your workloads. When you create a cache in a zone, data read requests originating from the zone are processed by the cache instead of the bucket. Each cache serves clients within the same zone as the cache.

Data from a bucket gets ingested into a cache when it's read by a VM that resides in the same zone as the cache. If you configure the ingest-on-write behavior, data is also ingested into the cache when it's written to the bucket.

Metadata is not cached. Requests for object metadata are always processed by the bucket instead of the cache.

For more information about how data gets ingested into a cache, see Data ingestion. You can configure a cache's Time to Live (TTL) and ingest-on-write behavior when you create or update the cache.

Benefits

When you cache your data with Rapid Cache, you get the following benefits:

• Get faster data access: Rapid Cache co-locates your data in the same zone as your compute resources and is fully backed by SSD. This enables your workloads to get up to 2.5 TB/s of throughput and reduces latency for faster reads.

• Reduce multi-region data transfer fees: Data that's read from the cache is charged reduced data transfer fees compared to data that's read directly from a multi-region bucket.

• Reduce retrieval fees: Retrieval fees for buckets in Nearline storage, Coldline storage, and Archive storage don't apply for data reads from the cache.

• Accrue lower costs from read operations: Read operations served from Rapid Cache are priced lower than Class B operations served from a bucket in Standard storage.

• Autoscale your cache size: Rapid Cache's dynamic SSD caching scales automatically based on usage without you needing to specify a cache size.

• Use caches efficiently: Rapid Cache can be enabled on existing buckets without requiring changes to your existing applications or APIs. Data stored within Rapid Cache is strongly consistent.

For details about pricing, see Rapid Cache pricing. For information about quotas, see Rapid Cache quotas.

When should you use Rapid Cache?

Use Rapid Cache for data that's infrequently changed and frequently read to accelerate data reads for analytics workloads and AI/ML model training and loading.

Say you're training an AI model across many Google Kubernetes Engine nodes, all repeatedly reading data that's stored in your Cloud Storage buckets and running in the same zone. When you create a cache in the zone where your workload is running, the cache provides extra bandwidth and helps you reduce the data transfer fees associated with reading data in multi-region buckets, letting you run larger, scaled workloads more efficiently.

Cache size and bandwidth limit autoscaling

Rapid Cache provides temporary storage capacity and bandwidth that automatically scale up or down according to the amount of data stored in a cache.

The cache bandwidth limit starts at 100 Gbps and scales at the rate of 20 Gbps per 1 TiB of stored data. You can increase the starting bandwidth or total bandwidth limit by increasing the amount of data stored in the cache, creating more caches in a zone, or contacting your Technical Account Manager or Google representative.

To learn more about size and bandwidth limits for Rapid Cache, see Cloud Storage quotas & limits.

Caching data in zones

When you create a cache for a bucket, the cache must be created in a zone within the location of your bucket. For example, if your bucket is located in the us-east1 region, you can create a cache in us-east1-b but not us-central1-c. If your bucket is located in the ASIA dual-region, you can create a cache in any zones that make up the asia-east1 and asia-southeast1 regions.

For each bucket, you can create a maximum of one cache per zone. For example, if a bucket is located in the us-east1 region, you could create a cache in us-east1-b and another cache in us-east1-c. If a bucket is located in a multi-region that encompasses us-central1 and us-east1, you could create a cache in us-central1-a and another cache in us-east1-b.

You can create caches in zones as long as capacity is available for the zone. If the capacity for creating a cache is unavailable, Rapid Cache continues trying to create a cache until the capacity becomes available or the creation process is cancelled by the user. The capacity might remain unavailable for a long period of time.

You can use Rapid Cache in the following zones. These zones can be used depending on the location type of your bucket.

Asia

The following table shows the zones and location types that are available for Rapid Cache in the Asia geographical area.

Zone name	Region	Dual-region	Multi-region	Custom dual-region
asia-east1-a	check		check	check
asia-east1-b	check		check	check
asia-east1-c	check		check	check
asia-northeast1-a	check	check
asia-northeast1-b	check	check
asia-northeast1-c	check	check
asia-south1-a	check
asia-south1-b	check
asia-south1-c	check
asia-southeast1-a	check		check	check
asia-southeast1-b	check		check	check
asia-southeast1-c	check		check	check

Europe

The following table shows the zones and location types that are available for Rapid Cache in the Europe geographical area.

Zone name	Region	Dual-region	Multi-region	Custom dual-region
europe-north1-a	check	check
europe-north1-b	check	check
europe-north1-c	check	check
europe-west1-b	check	check	check	check
europe-west1-c	check	check	check	check
europe-west1-d	check	check	check	check
europe-west3-a	check		check	check
europe-west3-b	check		check	check
europe-west3-c	check		check	check
europe-west4-a	check	check	check	check
europe-west4-b	check	check	check	check
europe-west4-c	check	check	check	check
europe-west4-ai1a (AI zone)	check
europe-west6-a	check	check
europe-west6-b	check	check

United States

The following table shows the zones and location types that are available for Rapid Cache in the United States geographical area.

Zone name	Region	Dual-region	Multi-region	Custom dual-region
us-central1-a	check	check	check	check
us-central1-b	check	check	check	check
us-central1-c	check	check	check	check
us-central1-f	check	check	check	check
us-central1-ai1a (AI zone)	check
us-east1-b	check	check	check	check
us-east1-c	check	check	check	check
us-east1-d	check	check	check	check
us-east4-a	check		check	check
us-east4-b	check		check	check
us-east4-c	check		check	check
us-east5-a	check		check	check
us-east5-b	check		check	check
us-east5-c	check		check	check
us-south1-a	check		check	check
us-south1-b	check		check	check
us-south1-c	check		check	check
us-south1-ai1b (AI zone)	check
us-west1-a	check		check	check
us-west1-b	check		check	check
us-west1-c	check		check	check