New Pub/Sub features arriving in Google Cloud

Learn about the new Pub/Sub features arriving in Google Cloud and more info about Pub/Sub lite

Source: Google Cloud

One of the biggest challenges that every organization faces today is creating real-time user experiences at a global scale. To help with that, Google Cloud offers Pub/Sub, a global, horizontally scalable messaging system. One of the advantages of using Pub/Sub is that it has been used for more than 10 years in Google including on Ads, Search and Gmail. The infrastructure is so amazing that's able to handle hundreds of millions of events per second.

Real-time analytics

Today, real-time analytics is critical for any business. Long-gone are the days where real-time decisions based on up-to-the-second data were used by cutting edge organizations. Today IDC reports that at least 25% of data created in the next five years will be real-time.

Combine that with an omni-channel presence and soon you require fresh data to operate and produce transaction and interaction data at unprecedented scale. 

Why real-time data?

It's important to note that real-time data is not just analytics. It can be used in monitoring, alerts, custom dashboards and automation. So let's understand why use Google Cloud Pub/Sub.

Why Pub/Sub

Over the last years, the Google Cloud has been working on drastically simplifying Pub/Sub so it can be more easily adopted by organizations. Some the many reasons to use Pub/Sub, are:

• Global availability
• A horizontally scalable messaging service
• Self-managed
• Up to 10,000 subscribers per topic supported
• Subscribers can be anywhere and receive a single stream of data aggregated from across all regions
• Integration with a broad range of applications on Google Cloud and elsewhere, from ingestion into BigQuery to automated, real-time AI-assisted decision making with Dataflow
• A much simpler experience than building your own cost-optimized Apache Kafka clusters to achieve ultra low-cost targets

New features in Pub/Sub

This year, Pub/Sub received lots of enterprise-grade features including:

• Scalable message ordering
• Dead-letter topics
• Filters
• Data residency controls
• Publisher flow control
• configurable retry policy
• subscription detachment. 

Pub/Sub Lite

And if you need an even cheaper version, Google Cloud has made available a Lite version of Pub/Sub which price is equivalent to that of a single-zone Apache Kafka or similar. Google claims that it can be as much as ten times cheaper, as long as the single-zone availability and capacity management models work for your use case. If you take into account the above mentioned features, it's fantastic!

When to use Pub/Sub Lite

But when to use Pub/Sub lite? Essentially, for these use cases:

• Security log analysis
• Search indexes and serving cache updates
• Gaming and media behavior analytics

More Information

For more information on when to use Pub/Sub or its lighter version, check this guide and the pricing comparisons.

References

• Pub/Sub makes scalable real-time analytics more accessible than ever

See Also

• Get Started with the new Cloud Shell Editor 
  
• HTTP/gRPC server streaming available in Google Cloud Run
• .NET, Java and Ruby now available in Google Cloud Functions
• Eventrac, a new events functionality to build event-driven applications on the Google Cloud
• Docker and Apache Flink available in Dataproc’s Component Exchange
• Logs Buckets and Log Views now available in the Google Cloud Platform