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.

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.

Feature

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.

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.

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.

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.

Best practices for using Cloud Storage with media workloads are now available.

Announced billing changes for accessing Cloud Storage through BigQuery take effect Feb 21, 2025. These changes were originally set to take effect on February 01, 2025.

You can now use the x-amz-decoded-content-length header to allow an XML API upload that uses chunked transfer encoding to include a signature in its Authorization header.

You can now restore soft-deleted buckets. If you delete a bucket with an active soft delete policy, Cloud Storage retains the bucket for the specified soft delete retention duration, during which the bucket can be restored to a live state. To learn more about the bucket restore feature, see Use soft-deleted buckets.

Data Access logs are now compatible with all authenticated browser downloads.

• When an authenticated browser download occurs outside of the Google Cloud console, a resulting Data Access log has its principalEmail and callerIp fields redacted.

Additional functionality is now available for the Object Retention Lock and Bucket Lock features:

• You can now enable Object Retention Lock on existing buckets using the Console.

• Enabling Object Retention Lock on a bucket will cause a lien to be placed, at best effort, on the project containing the bucket.

• Buckets can now have Bucket Lock and Object Versioning enabled at the same time.

You can now emit client-side metrics for gRPC. To learn which metrics are supported and how to emit them, see Use gRPC client-side metrics.

You can now use hierarchical namespace with Cloud Storage FUSE. To learn more about how mounting buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled can help improve performance, see Mount buckets with hierarchical namespace enabled.

You can now use parallel downloads with Cloud Storage FUSE to accelerate read performance of large files over 1 GB in size. When enabled, parallel downloads use multiple workers to download a file in parallel, accelerating file reads. For more information, see Improve read performance using parallel downloads.

You can now use the Google Cloud console to set a default soft delete retention duration. For more information, see Use tags to set a default soft delete retention duration for new buckets.

Feature

You can now use list caching with Cloud Storage FUSE, which is a cache for directory and file list, or ls, responses that improves list operation speeds. To learn more about list caching and how to enable it, see the Cloud Storage FUSE caching overview page.

You can now use tags to set a default soft delete retention duration on newly created buckets in your organization. To learn how to customize a default soft delete retention duration, see Set a default soft delete retention duration.

You can now specify Frankfurt (europe-west3) and Zürich (europe-west6) as a predefined dual-region pairing. For more information, see Predefined dual-regions.

You can now specify London (europe-west2) and Frankfurt (europe-west3) as a predefined dual-region pairing. For more information, see Predefined dual-regions.

You can now disable soft delete for multiple buckets at a time or for all buckets in a project. To learn more, see Bulk disable soft delete.