Instead of using Google Cloud or AWS Storage buckets; how do we create our own scalable storage bucket?
For example; if someone was to hit a photo 1 billion times a day. What would be the options here? Saying that the photo is user generated and not image/app generated.
If I have asked this in the wrong place, please redirect me.
As an alternative to GKE or AWS objects storage, you could consider using something like MinIO.
It's easy to set up, it could run in Kubernetes. All you need is some PersistentVolumeClaim, to write your data. Although you could use emptyDirs to evaluate the solution, with ephemeral storage.
A less obvious alternative would be something like Ceph. It's more complicated to setup, although it goes beyond objects storage. If you need to implement block storage as well, for your Kubernetes cluster, then Ceph could do this (Rados Block Devices), whilst offering with object storage (Rados Gateways).