This sounds like a solid next step. I’d like to stop storing URLs we don’t control in our DB and share URLs to these images behind a CDN. We could slowly roll that out and update each image url in our database over time with both continuing to work.
I didn’t realize you could do this with a private bucket by granting it access either. That combined with IP throttling at the CDN level might be a good replacement for this and cut out the need for Rails.
Google's documentation is inconsistent, but you do not need to make your bucket public, you can instead grant read access only to Cloud CDN: https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/using-signed-cookies#confi...
Dangerously incorrect documentation claiming the bucket must be public: https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/setting-up-cdn-with-bucket...