File storage, also known as network-attached storage (NAS), provides file-level access to applications to read and update information that can be shared across multiple machines. Some on-premises file storage solutions have a scale-up architecture and simply add storage to a fixed amount of compute resources. Other file storage solutions have a scale-out architecture where capacity and compute (performance) can be incrementally added to an existing file system as needed. In both storage architectures, one or multiple virtual machines (VMs) can access the storage.

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/filers-on-compute-engine