Yes, that is correct. That is one of the constraints of stateless share-nothing processes. This is also described in one of the principles in "The Twelve-Factor App": https://12factor.net/processes. All common/permanent state must be stored in common storage for all the processes.

Depending on the kind of permanent storage needed, you could use one or more of the managed databases offered by Google Cloud. Here is an overview: https://cloud.google.com/products/databases/. You could also provision another open source database yourself either in Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine, e.g. MongoDB. There is a lot of these on Marketplace, again for example MongoDB: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/click-t....