Cloud Storage release notes

Storage Intelligence advisor is now generally available. Storage Intelligence advisor lets you monitor and manage your Cloud Storage environment at scale across organizations, folders, and projects. For more information, see About Storage Intelligence advisor.

You can use Storage batch operations to do the following:

• Select objects dynamically across a project by using Common Expression Language (CEL) filters based on metadata in your Storage Insights datasets, without manual CSV manifests or BigQuery export queries.
• Target objects across up to 1,000 buckets in a single batch job.
• Transition objects in bulk to different storage classes.
• Patch object access control lists (ACLs) in bulk to update or remove permissions.
• Use dry run to validate job configurations across multiple buckets, and create jobs directly from a dry run to process the same validated objects.

For more information, see Storage batch operations overview and Create and manage batch operations jobs.

Rapid Cache supports prefix-level ingest-on-write filtering, allowing you to selectively ingest objects that match specific prefixes rather than ingesting all objects written to a bucket.

For more information, see Ingesting data on write.

If you delete your project, buckets that have soft delete enabled are now retained for a limited amount of time before being permanently deleted. If you restore a deleted project during this time period, these buckets are restored to the state that they were in when the project was deleted.

For more information about soft delete and the restoration window, see Soft delete.

Object Lifecycle Management conditions for sizeAboveBytes and sizeBelowBytes let you define a minimum and maximum size threshold for lifecycle actions.

When you create composite objects, you can delete the temporary source objects as part of the composition process.

As of August 26, 2026, in buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled, the Object Lifecycle Management Delete action will delete empty folders when the empty folder meets all of the conditions in the lifecycle rule.

You can manage object contexts in the Google Cloud Console. To learn more, see Use object contexts.

Cloud Storage now offers support for AI zones. To learn more, see AI zones.

Cloud Storage Model Context Protocol (MCP) server is generally available. You can connect to Cloud Storage from AI applications using the server. It lets AI applications and agents create buckets, retrieve object metadata, read and write object data, and list buckets and objects. For more information, see Use the Cloud Storage MCP server and Cloud Storage MCP reference.

You can delete up to 1,000 objects in a single request by using the Cloud Storage multi-object delete XML API. If you use Amazon S3-compatible tools or libraries, you can point your request to the Cloud Storage endpoint to use this feature with your existing workflows. For more information, see Delete objects and Delete multiple objects.

You can now use Storage batch operations to update object contexts for multiple objects in a single job. You can clear all existing contexts from the specified objects, remove contexts with specific keys, or update and insert new context key-value pairs. For more information, see Create and manage batch operation jobs.

Object contexts are now generally available. You can attach key-value pairs to your objects to categorize, track, and search your data. Object contexts are preserved by default during copy, rewrite, and compose operations. You can help control this behavior by using the dropContextGroups JSON API parameter or by providing new contexts in the request.

You can configure which encryption types are allowed or prohibited for creating new objects in a bucket. For more information, see Enforce or restrict the encryption types for a bucket.

You can now use Storage Insights datasets to help manage your data security and compliance. The ability to identify publicly accessible objects is now generally available. Additionally, new fields in bucket and object metadata schemas, such as encryption, retentionPeriod, encryptionType, and retentionExpirationTime, help you audit encryption configurations and monitor data retention policies. For more information, see Storage Insights datasets and Dataset tables and schemas.

Anywhere Cache has been renamed to Rapid Cache.

Object uploads that use customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) now fail if the Cloud Storage service agent lacks the necessary IAM role to decrypt the object. For steps to grant the required role, see Assign a Cloud KMS key to a service agent.

Rapid Bucket is now generally available. Rapid Bucket lets you store objects in the Rapid storage class by defining a zone as a bucket's location. This architecture optimizes data access and I/O performance between your storage and compute resources. Rapid Bucket is most suitable for data-intensive workloads like AI/ML and high-scale data analytics.

For more information, see Rapid Bucket and Create zonal buckets.

You can now identify publicly accessible objects (preview) by using Storage Insights datasets. The object metadata schema includes fields that provide the public access status of your objects, which lets you understand, organize, and manage publicly accessible objects at scale.

You can now analyze object data and metadata from your Storage Insights datasets by using BigQuery ObjectRef functions. The ref column in the dataset contains a reference to the Cloud Storage object which you can use with ObjectRef functions to analyze object content. For example, you can build queries to help detect sensitive information in documents or to generate image descriptions. For more information, see Analyze object data and metadata using BigQuery.

Object change notification is deprecated on January 30, 2026. To generate notifications for changes to objects, use Pub/Sub notifications for Cloud Storage instead.

Previously, when listing buckets by using the client libraries, JSON API, or RPC API, the request returned an error if some buckets couldn't be reached because a location was temporarily unavailable. You can now use a partial success option to return a list of buckets that are available, as well as the names of any buckets that can't be reached.

Bucket relocation with write downtime now supports completed multipart uploads. If a multipart upload is started before relocation begins and is completed before the final synchronization step, the objects are successfully relocated. In-progress multipart uploads continue to block the final synchronization step until they are either completed or cancelled. For more information, see Bucket relocation overview.

Cloud Storage now offers support in the Thailand, Bangkok (asia-southeast3) region. To learn more about supported locations, see Cloud Storage bucket locations.

You can now use dry run mode to simulate storage batch operations jobs without modifying or deleting data. Dry run helps you to validate your job configuration before running the actual operation.

To learn how to configure a dry run job, see Create and manage batch operations jobs.

When you bulk restore soft-deleted objects, you can restore objects that were live at a specific time. You can also choose the objects to restore based on the object creation time.