Feature Request: Symlink for Cloud Storage

What you would like to accomplish:

We are having very large files in our Cloud Storage Bucket,

Each file needs to be copied to many different directory paths due to the mechanism of our processing system.

So our team is looking for a way to perform symlink to those files, so that we can copy the symlinks to those directory paths instead of needing to copy the entire content of each file multiple times.

How this might work:

• The symlink is a pointer that points to an original file within the same bucket, or preferrably from any bucket.
• When we do download with the symlink, we will get the content of the original file,
• The symlink can have custom name, not necessarily of the original file.
• If symlink is pointing at a directory, allow accessing the files of the target directory.
• Similar to how soft link works on Linux.

If applicable, reasons why alternative solutions are not sufficient:

• One alternative can be to have a .txt file that contains the gcs-url to the original file, but it would involve modifying our legacy system and will cause issues.

• Other way can be to have an indexing database so we can do querying for the file-path from that database, but it would still involve heavily modifying our legacy system.

Other information (workarounds you have tried, documentation consulted, etc):

Stack Overflow question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12564669/an-object-in-google-cloud-storage-which-acts-as-a-redirect-or-symlink