Pull vs push subscriptions in GCP - Hands-On Comparison

Understanding Pull vs Push Subscriptions in Google Cloud Pub/Sub

📖 Scenario: You are working on a cloud messaging system using Google Cloud Pub/Sub. You want to understand how to create and configure pull and push subscriptions to receive messages from a topic.

🎯 Goal: Build two subscriptions for a Pub/Sub topic: one pull subscription and one push subscription with a specified endpoint.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Pub/Sub topic named my-topic

Create a pull subscription named my-pull-subscription for my-topic

Create a push subscription named my-push-subscription for my-topic with push endpoint https://example.com/push

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud Pub/Sub is used to decouple services by sending messages asynchronously. Pull and push subscriptions are two ways to receive these messages depending on your application's needs.

💼 Career

Understanding how to configure pull and push subscriptions is essential for cloud engineers and developers working with event-driven architectures on Google Cloud.

1

Create the Pub/Sub topic

Create a Pub/Sub topic named my-topic using the gcloud command.

GCP

# Use gcloud command to create the topic
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use gcloud pubsub topics create my-topic to create the topic.

2

Create a pull subscription

Create a pull subscription named my-pull-subscription for the topic my-topic using the gcloud command.

GCP

gcloud pubsub topics create my-topic
# Create a pull subscription named my-pull-subscription
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use gcloud pubsub subscriptions create my-pull-subscription --topic=my-topic to create the pull subscription.

3

Create a push subscription

Create a push subscription named my-push-subscription for the topic my-topic with the push endpoint https://example.com/push using the gcloud command.

GCP

gcloud pubsub topics create my-topic
gcloud pubsub subscriptions create my-pull-subscription --topic=my-topic
# Create a push subscription named my-push-subscription with push endpoint https://example.com/push
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use gcloud pubsub subscriptions create my-push-subscription --topic=my-topic --push-endpoint=https://example.com/push to create the push subscription.

4

Verify subscriptions

Use the gcloud command to list all subscriptions for the topic my-topic to verify both subscriptions exist.

GCP

gcloud pubsub topics create my-topic
gcloud pubsub subscriptions create my-pull-subscription --topic=my-topic
gcloud pubsub subscriptions create my-push-subscription --topic=my-topic --push-endpoint=https://example.com/push
# List subscriptions for my-topic
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use gcloud pubsub subscriptions list --topic=my-topic to see all subscriptions for the topic.