01
Emergency Incident Response
Backlog growing, subscribers stalled, or a publish path failing. A senior engineer joins a live bridge within 15 minutes with access to diagnose against your project — not a ticket acknowledgement.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub Support
24/7 Google Cloud Pub/Sub Support with a 15-Minute Emergency SLA
Last reviewed by Scott Sternloff
Pub/Sub is managed, but the failure modes are still yours: ack deadlines expiring under slow handlers, ordering keys serializing your throughput to one stream, push subscriptions backing up behind a 503, and exactly-once semantics quietly degrading. Every ticket reaches a named senior engineer who already knows your subscription topology.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
- min emergency SLA
- 15
- across Americas, EMEA, APAC
- 24/7
- enterprise customers
- 160+
- countries served
- 26+
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ Google Cloud Pub/Sub consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
Incident Triage
Google Cloud Pub/Sub problems we fix every week
These are real symptoms from real Google Cloud Pub/Sub production environments — and the first thing our engineers check when one comes in.
| Symptom you're seeing | What we check first | Typical resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Same messages delivered over and over, backlog never drains | Ack deadline against actual handler p99. If processing outlives the deadline, Pub/Sub redelivers while the first attempt is still running — so throughput drops as duplicate work multiplies. We check whether the client library's lease extension is running and whether a blocked thread pool is starving it. | Under 1 hour |
| Throughput collapsed after enabling message ordering | Ordering key cardinality. Pub/Sub delivers one ordering key strictly serially, so a low-cardinality key — a single tenant ID, a constant, a date — turns a parallel subscription into one stream. We look at key distribution before touching anything else. | 1-3 hours |
| Push subscription backlog climbing, no consumer errors visible | The push endpoint's HTTP response codes and latency. Anything that isn't 2xx counts as a nack, and Pub/Sub then backs off — so a dead or 500-ing endpoint produces a growing backlog with silence on the subscriber side. We pull the delivery metrics and hit the endpoint directly. | Under 1 hour |
| Exactly-once subscription still producing duplicates | Whether acks are actually succeeding. With exactly-once enabled, an ack that fails or arrives after the deadline is not honored, and the message is legitimately redelivered. We check ack response futures, the extended deadline window, and whether the client library version supports the guarantee at all. | 2-4 hours |
| Oldest unacked message age growing while subscribers look idle | Flow control settings against message size. A subscriber that has hit maxOutstandingBytes stops pulling entirely and looks healthy in every dashboard — CPU flat, no errors — while the backlog climbs behind it. | 1-3 hours |
| Messages silently disappearing before consumers see them | Subscription message retention, dead-letter topic configuration, and filter expressions. A subscription filter that no longer matches an evolved payload schema drops messages at the subscription, not the topic — and produces no error anywhere. | 2-4 hours |
| Publisher latency spiking, publish futures timing out | Batch settings and per-region publish quota. Aggressive batching plus a quota ceiling produces retry storms that look like network trouble; we separate quota rejections from genuine latency before changing client config. | Under 2 hours |
| Dead-letter topic filling up with messages that look fine | Max delivery attempts against transient downstream failures. A dead-letter policy tuned for poison messages will also drain perfectly valid traffic during a downstream outage, which is usually the wrong outcome and needs different retry handling. | Same day |
Resolution times reflect typical Google Cloud Pub/Sub engagements under an active AceMQ support contract. Every P1 closes with a written root-cause analysis.
What's Included
Everything in your Google Cloud Pub/Sub support contract
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
- 02
Root Cause Analysis
Every P1 closes with a written RCA: what failed, why, the fix applied, and the specific subscription or client change that prevents recurrence. Delivered as standard, not on request.
- 03
Throughput & Latency Tuning
Ack deadlines, flow control limits, ordering-key design, batch settings, and subscriber concurrency tuned against your real message sizes and handler timings rather than library defaults.
- 04
Cost & Quota Review
Pub/Sub bills on data volume, retention, and inter-region traffic. We find the subscriptions retaining seven days for no reason, the cross-region pulls nobody intended, and the retry loops paying twice for the same message.
- 05
Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Integration
Pub/Sub rarely lives alone. We support the bridges into Kafka, RabbitMQ, and on-prem MQ estates — Dataflow paths, Pub/Sub connectors, and custom relays — including ordering and delivery guarantees across the boundary.
- 06
Migration & Design Review
Kafka or RabbitMQ to Pub/Sub, Pub/Sub Lite consolidation, and topic and subscription design reviews before you scale a schema decision you cannot easily reverse.
Why AceMQ
What you get that you don't get elsewhere
Named Engineers, Zero Cold Start
The same senior engineers stay on your account. They know your topic layout, your ordering strategy, and your subscriber runtime — so a P1 call starts with diagnosis, not twenty minutes of you explaining your project structure.
No Tier-1 Triage Layer
You reach a senior messaging engineer directly by phone, email, or Slack. No help desk collecting information to pass along, no case number that sits overnight, and no escalation approval standing between you and someone who can fix it.
We Know What Pub/Sub Replaced
Most Pub/Sub incidents come from patterns carried over from Kafka, RabbitMQ, or IBM MQ that Pub/Sub models differently. We support all of them, so we recognize a consumer-group assumption or a queue-depth mental model on sight.
Genuine Follow-the-Sun Coverage
Engineers across 26+ countries and every time zone. Your 3am incident is someone's mid-afternoon — no overnight skeleton crew, no waiting for a region to wake up.
Beyond What Google Support Covers
Google will tell you the service is healthy, and it usually is. The problem is normally your ack deadline, your ordering keys, or your subscriber's flow control — the application-side surface a platform vendor cannot debug for you.
Full-Stack, Not Just the Broker
Pub/Sub problems are often not Pub/Sub problems. We diagnose across the client library, the JVM or runtime, GKE resource limits, VPC egress, and IAM — because that's where the root cause frequently actually lives.
We support Google Cloud Pub/Sub wherever it's deployed
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
- Google Cloud Platform (all regions)
- GKE & GKE Autopilot
- Cloud Run & Cloud Functions
- Compute Engine
- Pub/Sub Lite
- Dataflow & Apache Beam pipelines
- BigQuery & Cloud Storage subscriptions
- Multi-cloud (GCP + AWS or Azure)
- Hybrid with on-premise brokers
- VPC Service Controls / restricted perimeters
- Java, Python, Go, Node.js, and .NET clients
- Terraform-managed topics & subscriptions
Escalation Path
Your first hour of a Google Cloud Pub/Sub outage
Every tier reaches a senior Google Cloud Pub/Sub engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
- 15 minfirst responseEmergencyProduction down, messages not flowing, queue manager failure
- 1 hourfirst responseCriticalSevere degradation, high error rates, approaching capacity
- 4 hoursfirst responseHighPerformance issues, configuration problems, non-critical failures
- Next Dayfirst responseStandardQuestions, guidance, best practices, non-urgent improvements
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
T+Elapsed15:00
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
- T+00:00Paged
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
- T+15:00Live
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
- T+30:00If needed
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
- AfterEvery P1
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Pricing
What does AceMQ Google Cloud Pub/Sub support cost?
AceMQ Google Cloud Pub/Sub support contracts typically run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on SLA level, scope (number of clusters or nodes, and environments) and deployment (self-managed, cloud-managed or Kubernetes).
| What moves the price | How it changes the contract |
|---|---|
| SLA level | Business-hours cover costs less than 24/7 cover with a 15-minute emergency response. |
| Scope | More clusters or nodes, and more environments, make a larger contract. |
| Deployment | Self-managed, cloud-managed and Kubernetes estates need different amounts of hands-on work. |
Covering several technologies under one contract, for example RabbitMQ, Kafka and Redis, earns an aggressive discount.
Support In Practice
Google Cloud Pub/Sub problems we've already solved
Google Cloud Pub/Sub support and remediation work from AceMQ. Each card links to the full write-up: the topics and subscribers, what AceMQ diagnosed or changed, and the result, so you can see how a similar problem was handled.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub Architecture and Cost Assessment
Enterprise Technology Organizations
A review of Pub/Sub subscription design, acknowledgement handling, dead-letter policy and cost drivers, including an honest comparison against self-managed messaging.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
KubernetesStopping a Pub/Sub Redelivery Spiral on GKE Subscribers
Digital Wallet Provider
Subscribers on GKE fell behind, Pub/Sub redelivered messages they were still working on, and members received duplicate notifications. AceMQ found the gap between the ack deadline and the handler.
Google Cloud Pub/SubKubernetes
Java
PostgreSQLPub/Sub Dead-Letter Topics That Never Received a Message
Telecom Billing Provider
Six subscriptions had a dead-letter policy, and poison messages kept cycling anyway. AceMQ found missing service agent permissions and a dead-letter topic with nothing subscribed to it.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Terraform
PythonRestoring Pub/Sub Throughput After Message Ordering Was Enabled
Logistics Technology Provider
Throughput fell to a trickle after message ordering was switched on. AceMQ found a low-cardinality ordering key and publishers that had stopped sending for a key after a single failed publish.
Google Cloud Pub/SubKubernetesPython
Support options
Four tiers of Google Cloud Pub/Sub support.
AceMQ offers Google Cloud Pub/Sub support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and incident management for subscriptions your team runs, proactive monitoring that catches ack deadline, ordering and dead-letter problems first, managed Pub/Sub inside your own Google Cloud project, and fully managed Pub/Sub run on your behalf from AceMQ-managed Google Cloud projects and infrastructure, including the subscribers and bridges around it. Pull and push subscriptions are covered in all four.
- Tier 1
Google Cloud Pub/Sub 24/7 Support & Incident Management
You run it, we back you up
- 15-minute P1 response, 24/7, by phone, email or Slack
- Diagnosis from ack deadline, oldest unacked age and delivery metrics
- Named senior engineers, no tier-1 triage layer
Best for: Teams that run Pub/Sub workloads themselves and need senior escalation cover.
- Tier 2
Google Cloud Pub/Sub 24/7 Support with Proactive Monitoring
You run it, we watch it with you
- Alerts on oldest unacked age, expired ack deadlines and dead-letter count
- Ordering key cardinality and publish error handling checks
- Dead-letter topic permissions, subscriptions and replay drills
Best for: Teams that want a redelivery loop or a silent dead-letter gap found in a review, not in an outage.
- Tier 3
Managed Google Cloud Pub/Sub on Your Infrastructure
We run it in your cloud or data centre
- AceMQ runs day-2 operations and holds the pager
- Works in your projects, VPC Service Controls perimeters and networks
- Scaling, cost and alerting managed to an agreed plan
Best for: Regulated estates that must keep messaging inside their own Google Cloud projects.
- Tier 4
Fully Managed Google Cloud Pub/Sub on AceMQ Infrastructure
We host it and run it, as a service
- Topics, subscribers, bridges and connectors operated by AceMQ
- High availability, patching and upgrades included
- 24/7 on-call with the same 15-minute emergency response
Best for: Teams that want Pub/Sub and the subscriber layer around it operated for them.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs Google Cloud Pub/Sub day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Everything else AceMQ does for Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for Google Cloud Pub/Sub. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
- ConsultingGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub consulting and services
- LifecycleEnd-of-life software support
- Enterprise supportOpen source support across your whole stack
- GuideGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub guide
Support for the rest of your stack
Messaging & Streaming
- RabbitMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Kafka supportMessaging & Streaming
- IBM MQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- ActiveMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Azure Service Bus supportMessaging & Streaming
- Amazon SQS supportMessaging & Streaming
- Redpanda supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Pulsar supportMessaging & Streaming
- Message Queuing supportMessaging & Streaming
Databases & Caching
Search & Analytics
Lakehouse & Compute
Observability & Monitoring
Data Integration
Cloud & Containers
API Management
See support for all 51 technologiesShow fewer
Related services
FAQ
Google Cloud Pub/Sub support questions
Still have questions about Google Cloud Pub/Sub? Email an Expert
What does AceMQ Google Cloud Pub/Sub support include?
Our Pub/Sub support covers 24/7 emergency incident response with a 15-minute SLA, root cause analysis on every P1, throughput and latency tuning, cost and quota review, integration support for hybrid estates, and design review before major topology changes. Every ticket is handled by a named senior engineer assigned to your account. There is no tier-1 triage layer and no per-incident charge.
Pub/Sub is fully managed by Google. What is there to support?
Google operates the service; you still own everything that determines whether it works for you. Ack deadlines, ordering key design, flow control limits, push endpoint behavior, subscription filters, dead-letter policy, and retention settings are all yours, and in our experience they cause the overwhelming majority of production incidents. Google support will confirm the service is healthy — which is usually true and rarely the answer you need at 3am.
Why did our throughput drop after we enabled message ordering?
Pub/Sub guarantees ordering per ordering key, and delivers messages for a single key strictly one at a time. If your ordering key has low cardinality — a constant, a region, a single large tenant — every message for that key queues behind the previous one, and a subscription that was parallel becomes serial. The fix is almost always key redesign toward higher cardinality rather than adding subscriber capacity, which does nothing.
How fast do you respond to a Pub/Sub production incident?
P1 emergencies — backlog growing uncontrolled, subscribers stalled, publish path failing — get a 15-minute first response with a senior engineer joining a live bridge. P2 critical issues are 1 hour, P3 high-priority 4 hours, and P4 standard questions next business day. These are contractual, not best-effort targets.
Do you support Pub/Sub alongside Kafka or on-premise brokers?
Yes, and that is a large share of what we do. Most enterprises running Pub/Sub also run Kafka, RabbitMQ, or IBM MQ somewhere, with bridges between them. We support the brokers on both sides and the connectors between, including where ordering and delivery guarantees change as a message crosses the boundary — which is where cross-platform incidents almost always originate.
Can you help us migrate to or from Pub/Sub?
Yes. We plan and execute migrations between Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and traditional MQ with zero message loss, including semantic mapping, parallel-run validation, and canary cutover. We will also tell you honestly when a migration is not warranted — several teams have come to us convinced they needed to leave Pub/Sub when the actual problem was a subscription setting.
What is Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and when should we use it?
Pub/Sub is Google Cloud's asynchronous messaging service. Publisher applications send messages to a topic, Pub/Sub stores them, and subscriber applications receive them through pull or push subscriptions, with each subscription getting its own copy. It is designed to ingest and deliver event streams at any scale, which makes it the natural backbone for event-driven microservices on Google Cloud, for streaming data into BigQuery and Dataflow pipelines, and for real-time data processing where producers and consumers scale independently. It is a poor fit where you need strict ordering across a whole stream without ordering keys, long replay windows beyond the message retention duration, or protocol compatibility with existing Kafka or JMS clients, which is where Kafka, Pub/Sub Lite or a broker fits better.
What are the limits of Pub/Sub that cause production problems?
Most incidents come from limits and defaults rather than outages. Message retention is seven days by default and up to 31, and an acknowledged message is gone, so a consumer bug that acks and then fails loses data. The acknowledgement deadline is short by default, and subscribers that process slowly see redelivery and duplicates unless they extend it or use exactly-once delivery, which has its own throughput cost. Ordering keys serialise delivery per key and can collapse throughput if one key is hot. Push subscriptions are limited by the endpoint's ability to accept traffic. Access control through IAM at the topic and subscription level is powerful and easy to over-grant. Our support covers the subscriber and publisher code, the client libraries and their flow control settings, and the Google Cloud console configuration, which is the layer Google's own support does not diagnose for you.
Can we work with AceMQ on Google Cloud Pub/Sub without a long contract?
Yes. AceMQ works on Google Cloud Pub/Sub in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual partner engagement that covers 24/7 support, proactive reviews and named engineers. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual partnership once the first engagement is done.
How much does AceMQ Google Cloud Pub/Sub support or consulting cost?
Every AceMQ proposal is tailored to your requirements: your Google Cloud Pub/Sub environment, the SLA you need, the hours of cover and the scope of work. Most contracts run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on the SLA, the scope and how Google Cloud Pub/Sub is deployed, with aggressive discounts when several technologies share one contract. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
Your Pub/Sub Backlog Shouldn't Be Your First Warning
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running Google Cloud Pub/Sub for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
A senior Google Cloud Pub/Sub engineer, not a sales queueQuote requests answered within 1 hourAd hoc engagements or an annual partnership
Production incident right now?Email a Google Cloud Pub/Sub Architect
Get in Touch
Talk to a Google Cloud Pub/Sub Expert
Send us a message and we'll follow up within 1 hour — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.
305-204-2607info@acemq.com66 W. Flagler St. 9th Floor
Miami, FL 33130
Miami, FL 33130
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