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As the cloud storage market continues to accelerate, Google Cloud Storage is offering new features that bear a striking resemblance to Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS).

Google’s Cloud Storage includes new features to make it easier for developers to manage objects and have faster access to upload data. Google’s (News - Alert) Object Lifecycle Management feature defines when an object should be deleted and allows developers choose in which region their files will be stored to reduce latency between their storage and Compute Engine instances.

“For example, you could configure a bucket so objects older than 365 days are deleted, or only keep the 3 most recent versions of objects in a versioned bucket,” Brian Dorsey, Google developer programs engineer explained in a blog post. “Once you have configured Lifecycle Management, the expected expiration time will be added to object metadata when possible, and all operations are logged in the access log.”

Google’s Regional Buckets also allow users to colocate their Durable Reduced Availability data in the same region as their Google Compute Engine instances.

“You can still specify the less-granular United States or European datacenter locations if you'd like your data spread over multiple regions, which may be a better fit for content distribution use cases,” Dorsey explained.

As Google notes, developers using the Google Cloud Storage platform are now able to upload their files faster with Gsutil version 3.34, which automatically uploads large objects in parallel for higher throughput. Achieving maximum TCP throughput on most networks requires multiple connections, and this makes it easy and automatic

“We think there’s a little something here for everyone: If you’re managing temporary or versioned objects, running compute jobs over Cloud Storage data, or using Gsutil to upload data, you’ll want to take advantage of these features right away,” Dorsey added.

On the consumer side, Apple (News - Alert) is leading the cloud storage market, followed closely by Dropbox (News - Alert), Amazon and Google, according to a Strategy Analytics survey.

In fact, 27 percent of cloud storage users have used Apple’s iCloud followed by 17 percent for Dropbox, 15 percent for Amazon Cloud Drive and 10 percent for Google Drive.