Messaging on the Cloud

In the seventh episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark discuss the different ways messaging can be done on Google Cloud Platform, covering Pub/Sub and Task Queues and when to choose what.

Links:

• Google Cloud Vision API blog post
• Photo Scavenger Hunt app
• Google Task Queues documentation
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub documentation
• Exporting logs documentation

Feature comparison

Feature	Task Queues	Pub/Sub
Pull via API	Yes	Yes
Push via Webhooks	Yes	Yes
Max size of message	100K	10MB
At least once delivery guarantee	Yes	Yes
Batch Insert	Only in App Engine	Yes
Multiple receivers	No	Yes
Datastore Transactions	Yes	No
Maximum Messages/s	1B (with billing) 250 msg/q/s	Unlimited (after request)
Throttling	Yes	No (if needed → pull)
Performance	median 5ms (99%ile 300ms)	Sub-second even when tested at over 1M msg/s
Cloud Monitoring	No	Yes