Pub/Sub

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is an asynchronous messaging service that enables reliable and scalable message exchange between different applications.

It is designed to connect heterogeneous components, such as microservices, web applications, and IoT devices, facilitating real-time message transfer. It operates on a publisher-subscriber model: publishers send messages to a topic, while subscribers subscribe to that topic to receive messages.

The key advantages of Pub/Sub include its scalability, thanks to automatic scaling, and its seamless integration with other GCP services (such as Google Cloud IAM for security or Cloud Functions and Dataflow for data processing). Fully managed, Pub/Sub is also easier to set up than Kafka, its main competitor, which is often self-hosted. However, Pub/Sub provides less control and customization, particularly in data flow management: it does not support JSON schemas and limits schema revisions to 20 versions.

Additionally, for very high data volumes, a self-hosted Kafka solution may be more cost-effective.

THEODO'S POINT OF VIEW

We recommend adopting Pub/Sub if your company is already integrated into the Google Cloud ecosystem or if you are looking for a managed solution to reduce the operational workload associated with messaging infrastructure management. Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a robust and high-performance option for organizations seeking to implement a reliable and scalable messaging infrastructure.

MDN’S POINT OF VIEW

This self-managed queuing technology by Google is well integrated with the entire GCP ecosystem. Simpler than Kafka, but with fewer configurable options (such as the number of acknowledgments at the replica level), it is geo-distributed across multiple GCP regions to prevent message loss. However, additional costs should be anticipated for egress/ingress traffic and message replication across regions.