Is there any advantage to using gsutil or the google cloud storage API in production transfers?

Question

Which is better to use with production transfers, gsutil, or the google cloud storage API?

Answer 1

gsutil uses a Google Cloud Storage API to transfer data, specifically the JSON API (by default, you can change it). Its main advantage over using the API directly is that it has been tuned to transfer data quickly. For example, it can open up multiple simultaneous connections to GCS, each of which is uploading or downloading part of the file concurrently, which in many cases can provide a significant boost to total throughput.

There's no reason that programming against the API directly could not also provide the same or even better performance, but I would expect gsutil to be at least a little bit faster on average if you implement things in the simplest possible manner.