Overview
Pub/Sub takes broker operations off the team, but subscription model, acknowledgement deadlines, ordering guarantees and dead-letter policy are still design decisions, and they still decide whether messages are lost or duplicated.
Challenge
The usual failure modes are redelivery from acknowledgement deadlines that are too short for the consumer, unbounded dead-letter growth nobody is watching, and a bill that scales differently from the workload once volume climbs.
Environment
Applicable to any Google Cloud Pub/Sub deployment, including estates alongside self-managed RabbitMQ or Kafka.
Approach
AceMQ reviews topic and subscription design against delivery requirements, acknowledgement and retry behavior against real consumer processing time, dead-letter and retention policy, and the cost drivers that dominate at the current and projected volume, including where self-managed messaging becomes cheaper.
Solution
- Topic and subscription design review against delivery guarantees
- Acknowledgement deadline and redelivery behavior analysis
- Dead-letter topic and retention policy review
- Ordering and exactly-once expectation validation
- Cost modeling at current and projected volume
- Comparison against self-managed RabbitMQ or Kafka where it is warranted
Outcome
Teams get a clear account of where their Pub/Sub design will duplicate or drop messages, what it will cost at the next volume step, and whether managed messaging is still the right call.
Technologies
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Kubernetes
RabbitMQ
Docker
Python
PostgreSQL
dbt
Kong
