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What is Google Pub/Sub and What Are Its Advantages?

The ultimate in stream analytics and data integration: Google Pub/Sub

The Pub/Sub pattern, an architectural design approach, allows different services to communicate asynchronously with delays of up to 100 milliseconds. This model is offered by different technology providers. Google Cloud Pub/Sub is positioning its Pub/Sub solution for use cases such as data flow analysis and data integration within the Cloud family. As Global IT, we focus on Google Cloud Pub/Sub in this article.

We explained in the following article that the Internet basically consists of communication between publishers and subscribers, and that new models are needed to provide this communication as monolithic applications are replaced by applications developed with microservice architecture.

Messaging frameworks stand out as an integral part of the huge chunks of data that modern applications have. These communication frameworks ensure security and efficiency within data stacks, and serve as the primary medium for communication between all services within the application. Although the messaging queue model used for point-to-point messaging responds to the needs of traditional systems, today’s applications require large-scale flows. These large-scale flows come to life thanks to providers like Google that offer Pub/Sub pattern solutions in the cloud.

As Global IT, the first cloud solution partner of Google Cloud in Turkey, we focus on the Google Cloud Pub/Sub solution in this article. In our article where we will talk about the definition and advantages of Google Cloud Pub / Sub, we also talk about usage scenarios.

What is Google Pub/Sub?

Google Pub/Sub is a solution that allows you to ingest events into a Google BigQuery solution, repositories or operational databases for streaming. Used for stream analytics and data integration to ingest and distribute data, Pub/Sub offers an effective solution for service integration, such as an interlude software for messaging or a queue. Pub/Sub is used to create systems of event producers and consumers called publishers and subscribers. Publishers, through Google Pub/Sub, can make synchronous remote procedure calls (synchronous remote procedure calls | RPCs) instead of broadcasting events, so you can communicate asynchronously with your subscribers.

In our previous article, we gave the example of social media, we mentioned that in order to deliver your message to your friends on a platform like Twitter, you do not need to know what each of them is doing at that moment or not, whether they will see your message or not. Publishers use the Pub/Sub service regardless of how or when the events they send to their subscribers will be processed. The Pub/Sub then forwards the events to all the services that react to them. While publishers must wait for subscribers to receive data for requests that communicate via RPCs, the asynchronous integration offered by Pub/Sub increases the flexibility and robustness of the overall system.

How does Google Cloud Pub/Sub work?

Google’s solution Google Pub/Sub, which allows businesses to apply the Pub/Sub model to their business processes, basically follows these steps:

● A publisher application creates messages and sends these messages to the topic considered the main source. Messages are stored on the subject until they are noticed by all subscribers.

● The subscriber application that wants to receive these messages starts a subscription to the topic in question.

● Subscribers access the message generated by the publisher application and sent to the topic via Pub/Sub (push) or by requesting (pull).

● When the messages reach the recipient, the relevant message is deleted from the subscriber log and prevented from being sent again.

In this respect, Google’s Pub/Sub solution provides advantages in terms of data scalability and customization. Pub/Sub, Google’s asynchronous real-time messaging service, offers an ideal solution for large data streaming applications. The advantage of cloud platforms is also responding to messaging needs through Google Pub/Sub.

Google Pub/Sub features and benefits

As a cloud solution, Google Pub/Sub can be paired with all of Google’s other solutions in the cloud. The Pub/Sub solution, which Google evaluates in the data analytics category, can also interoperate with other solutions such as BigQuery and Dataflow, and is important for turning findings from data exchanges into powerful insights. The main features and advantages of Google Pub/Sub can be listed as follows:

● Stream analytics: Native streaming integration enables reliable, meaningful, fully one-time processing and integration of event streams in Java, Python and SQL.

● Order delivery at any scale: On-demand per-key sorting simplifies stateful application logic without sacrificing horizontal scale.

● A cost-effective option: The Google Pub/Sub solution becomes even more cost-effective with a less comprehensive version, Pub/Sub Lite.

● High availability: Synchronized, cross-region message replication and per-message receipt tracking ensure reliable delivery and uninterrupted access at any scale.

● An easy and clear foundation for real-time data systems: Offering a fast and reliable way to retrieve small records in any volume, Pub/Sub serves as an entry point for BigQuery’s repositories and pipelines of real-time and batch pipelines that feed into operational databases. In addition, the information gained with Pub/Sub can also be used in Dataflow.

● Automation: Teams using Google Pub/Sub do not need to plan the size of the infrastructure and determine the scaling strategy. Autoscaling and provisioning eliminate the need for planning and ensure workloads are production-ready from day one.

Common uses for Google Pub/Sub

On the product page where Google shares the documentation for Pub/Sub, the common uses of Google Pub/Sub are summarized with the following items:

Receive user interaction and server events: Those who want to receive user interaction events or server events from end-user applications can direct this information to the Pub/Sub. Once that’s done, those who want to pass events to their databases can use a stream processing tool like Dataflow.

Real-time event distribution: All events, processed or unprocessed, can be exposed to multiple applications across the team and enterprise for real-time processing.

Copying data between databases: Pub/Sub is also often used to distribute change events through databases. These events can be used to create views such as the state of the database in BigQuery and other data storage systems.

Parallel processing and workflows: Pub/Sub messages can also be used to efficiently distribute many tasks among multiple employees. By connecting to Cloud Functions, teams can delegate tasks such as compressing text files, sending email notifications, and reforming images to different employees.

Enterprise event station: Businesses can also position the Pub/Sub as a corporate event station. This enables it to create an enterprise-wide real-time data path that distributes database updates and analytical events.

Stream data from apps, services, or IoT devices: Apps, services, or IoT devices can transfer the data they collect to other Google Cloud products in real time via Pub/Sub.

What are the types of Google Pub/Sub service?

Google Pub/Sub offers two services: Pub/Sub and Pub/Sub Lite. The Pub/Sub service stands out as a default choice for most users or applications. Offering the highest reliability and widest set of integrations combined with automated capacity management, this solution guarantees that all data is replicated simultaneously to at least two regions and delivered to a third additional region.

Pub/Sub Lite is a separate but similar messaging service created for lower cost. Offering lower reliability than Pub/Sub, Pub/Sub Lite stores data in only one domain with Zonal Lite, while Regional Lite replicates data to a second region asynchronously. Pub/Sub Lite is generally preferred only for applications that aim for low cost and take some additional operational work. The differences between the two services are outlined in detail in the following article.

Contact Global IT for details on Google Pub/Sub

Using large volumes of data for analysis? Or do you want to streamline event-based development processes? With over 16 years of Google Cloud experience as Global IT, we’re ready to give you everything you need to take advantage of all that Pub/Sub has to offer.

With more than 3,300 projects implemented since 2006 and more than 700 corporate references moved to the cloud, we also make it easy for you to access Pub/Sub solutions that offer a scalable, flexible and new way of internet messaging. If you want to know more about the Google Cloud Pub/Sub service, which will make their work easier in the field of data analytics and allow you to stay one step ahead of the competition, you can contact us by filling out the form below.