gcsfuse

gcsfuse is Google's official FUSE adapter that mounts a Cloud Storage bucket as a local directory. Read and write files like any other path, with the bytes living in GCS. Apache 2.0 and free, generally available with Google support. The headline use case is machine-learning training pipelines that want a filesystem interface to bucket data without staging copies.

Setup is the standard FUSE story: install the binary, run 'gcsfuse <bucket> <mount-point>', you're done. It has file caching to speed up repeated reads and streaming writes for big uploads without buffering everything. Works on Linux and macOS.

For solo developers and small teams on Google Cloud, this is a clean way to point a process at a bucket without rewriting it to use the GCS API. For ML teams, the caching can materially accelerate dataset access during training. The software is free; the actual GCS data operations bill at Google's standard rates.

The catch: this is not a POSIX filesystem. Some operations are slow or behave differently than a local disk: small-file workloads, frequent overwrites, and metadata-heavy patterns hurt. For real database I/O, do not mount and run, you'll regret it. For sequential reads, large files, and ML training, it's a fit.