Google’s Cloud Pub/Sub Real-Time Messaging Service Is Now In Public Beta

Google is launching the first public beta of Cloud Pub/Sub today, its backend messaging service that makes it easier for developers to pass messages between machines and to gather data from smart devices. It’s basically a scalable messaging middleware service in the cloud that allows developers to quickly pass information between applications, no matter where they’re hosted. Snapchat is already using it for its Discover feature and Google itself is using it in applications like its Cloud Monitoring service.
Pub/Sub was in alpha for quite a while. Google first (quietly) introduced it at its I/O developer conference last year, it never made a big deal about the service. Until now, the service was in private alpha, but starting today, all developers can use the service.

Using the Pub/Sub API, developers can create up to 10,000 topics (that’s the entity the application sends its messages to) and send up to 10,000 messages per second. Google says notifications should go out in under a second “even when tested at over 1 million messages per second.”
The typical use cases for this service, Google says, include balancing workloads in network clusters, implementing asynchronous workflows, logging to multiple systems, and data streaming from various devices.

During the beta period, the service is available for free. Once it comes out of beta, developers will have to pay $0.40 per million for the first 100 million API calls each month. Users who need to send more messages will pay $0.25 per million for the next 2.4 billion operations (that’s about 1,000 messages per second) and $0.05 per million for messages above that.
Now that Pub/Sub has hit beta — and Google even announced the pricing for the final release — chances are we will see a full launch around Google I/O this summer.