Bring Your Own GCS Bucket
This feature is available to Fivetran Paid Plans. Please contact your account representative for details before proceeding with these steps.
Buckets are used for 2 purposes
- Temporary storage for warehouse unloads during sync runs
- Record-level sync tracking for observability
If you bring your own GCS bucket:
- It will only be used for warehouse unloads from BigQuery and select other warehouses. Please contact support for the full list, or if you'd like to use your GCS bucket for every warehouse unload temporary storage.
- It will be used as the record-level sync tracking storage for every sync run, regardless of source or destination.
After following the steps below, you must provide your support representative with details. Please contact support via the Fivetran Support portal.
Your Activations rep will require
- GCP Project ID
- GCS Bucket Name
- GCP Service Account Email
Configuring a bucket for Sync Tracking
1. Create a GCS Service Account
Log into Google Cloud Console and navigate to IAM & Admin -> Service Accounts

- Click Create Service Account
- Enter a Service Account Name
- Keep the generated Service Account ID, generate a new one, or enter your own
- Copy the Service Account ID
- Configure the project permissions for the Service Account

2. Generate a Service Account Key
Log into Google Cloud Console and navigate to IAM & Admin -> Service Accounts
Click the name of your Service Account

Open the Keys tab and click Add Key -> Create New Key

Choose the key type "JSON" and click Create

Save the generated
.jsonfile in a secure location.

3. Create a GCS Bucket
Log into Google Cloud Console and navigate to your Project
Go to Cloud Storage -> Buckets and click Create

Give your bucket a name
Configure the bucket settings
- Location: choose the same location setting as your BigQuery project
- Storage Class: Standard
- Check Enforce Public Access Prevention
- Access Control: Uniform
- Leave versioning, and encryption on defaults.
- Lifecycle Policy: Lifecycle rules should be enabled to:
- Action: Delete object
- Object condition: 14+ days since object was created
Name matches prefix 'sync-unloads/'.
Once the bucket has been created, navigate to Permissions
Grant your Service Account the permissions
- Storage Object User
- Storage Object Creator

Configuring a bucket for temporary warehouse unloads from BigQuery
When creating your BigQuery connection
- In Activations, create a connection to BigQuery using the appropriate Project ID and Location.
- Paste the contents of the Service Account Key JSON file (from above) into the Service Account Key JSON (Optional) box.
- Click Connect and Confirm
Note: There is no need to copy and run the GCP Console commands
provided in-app when following this setup guide. Please ignore them.
