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Google Cloud Pub/Sub VS Apache Flink

Compare Google Cloud Pub/Sub VS Apache Flink and see what are their differences

Google Cloud Pub/Sub logo Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Cloud Pub/Sub is a flexible, reliable, real-time messaging service for independent applications to publish & subscribe to asynchronous events.

Apache Flink logo Apache Flink

Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.
  • Google Cloud Pub/Sub Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-23
  • Apache Flink Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03

Google Cloud Pub/Sub features and specs

  • Scalability
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub is designed to handle large volumes of messages, allowing it to scale effortlessly to accommodate varying workloads.
  • Global Availability
    The service is globally distributed, ensuring low-latency access and reliability wherever your application is hosted.
  • Asynchronous Communication
    Supports asynchronous communication between services, decoupling the producer and consumer, leading to better fault tolerance and resource utilization.
  • Integration
    It integrates smoothly with other Google Cloud services and supports many third-party tools, enhancing its utility in diverse environments.
  • Security
    Offers robust security features including encryption of messages both at rest and in transit.
  • Managed Service
    Being a fully managed service, it reduces the operational overhead associated with maintaining messaging infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Google Cloud Pub/Sub

  • Cost Structure
    Depending on usage patterns, costs can increase significantly, making it difficult to predict expenses in high-throughput scenarios.
  • Complexity
    For beginners, setting up Pub/Sub and managing topics and subscriptions can be complex and require a learning curve.
  • Latency Variability
    While generally low, message delivery latency can sometimes vary, especially under peak loads.
  • Dependency on Network
    As a cloud-based service, its performance is heavily dependent on network reliability, which might not be suitable for extremely sensitive real-time applications.
  • Limited Message Retention
    By default, messages are retained for a limited period, which may not be suitable for applications needing long-term message storage.

Apache Flink features and specs

  • Real-time Stream Processing
    Apache Flink is designed for real-time data streaming, offering low-latency processing capabilities that are essential for applications requiring immediate data insights.
  • Event Time Processing
    Flink supports event time processing, which allows it to handle out-of-order events effectively and provide accurate results based on the time events actually occurred rather than when they were processed.
  • State Management
    Flink provides robust state management features, making it easier to maintain and query state across distributed nodes, which is crucial for managing long-running applications.
  • Fault Tolerance
    The framework includes built-in mechanisms for fault tolerance, such as consistent checkpoints and savepoints, ensuring high reliability and data consistency even in the case of failures.
  • Scalability
    Apache Flink is highly scalable, capable of handling both batch and stream processing workloads across a distributed cluster, making it suitable for large-scale data processing tasks.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Flink has a rich set of APIs and integrations with other big data tools, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Cassandra, enhancing its versatility and ease of integration into existing data pipelines.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Flink

  • Complexity
    Flink’s advanced features and capabilities come with a steep learning curve, making it more challenging to set up and use compared to simpler stream processing frameworks.
  • Resource Intensive
    The framework can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial memory and CPU resources for optimal performance, which might be a concern for smaller setups or cost-sensitive environments.
  • Community Support
    While growing, the community around Apache Flink is not as large or mature as some other big data frameworks like Apache Spark, potentially limiting the availability of community-contributed resources and support.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Despite its integrations, the Flink ecosystem is still maturing, and certain tools and plugins may not be as developed or stable as those available for more established frameworks.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running and maintaining a Flink cluster can involve significant operational overhead, including monitoring, scaling, and troubleshooting, which might require a dedicated team or additional expertise.

Analysis of Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Overall verdict

  • Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a powerful and reliable messaging service that is highly regarded for its scalability, integration capabilities, and security features. It is a strong choice for businesses looking for a robust cloud-based messaging solution.

Why this product is good

  • Scalability: Google Cloud Pub/Sub is built to handle huge amounts of data, making it ideal for large-scale applications.
  • Reliability: It provides strong reliability and consistent performance due to its distributed nature across multiple data centers.
  • Integration: Pub/Sub integrates well with other Google Cloud services, enhancing its functionality and making it easier to create comprehensive cloud solutions.
  • Security: Offers robust security features including encryption at rest and in transit, aligning with Google Cloud's overall focus on security.
  • Ease of Use: It provides a user-friendly interface and comprehensive documentation, making it accessible even for those new to cloud services.

Recommended for

  • Organizations needing to process and analyze large volumes of messages in real-time.
  • Developers building cloud-native applications requiring scalable messaging services.
  • Businesses already leveraging the Google Cloud ecosystem, as Pub/Sub integrates seamlessly with other services.
  • Teams looking for a secure and reliable messaging solution with global availability.

Analysis of Apache Flink

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Apache Flink is considered a good distributed stream processing framework.

Why this product is good

  • Rich api
    Flink offers a rich set of APIs for various levels of abstraction, catering to different needs of developers.
  • Scalability
    Flink provides excellent horizontal scalability, making it suitable for handling large data streams and high-throughput applications.
  • Fault tolerance
    Flink's checkpointing mechanism ensures fault-tolerance, maintaining data state consistency even after failures.
  • Ease of integration
    Flink integrates well with other big data tools and ecosystems, facilitating broader data architecture designs.
  • Real-time processing
    It excels at processing data in real-time, allowing for immediate insights and action on streaming data.
  • Community and support
    Being a part of the Apache Software Foundation, Flink benefits from a large community and comprehensive documentation.
  • Complex event processing
    It supports complex event processing, which is essential for many real-time applications.

Recommended for

  • real-time analytics
  • stream data processing
  • complex event processing
  • machine learning in streaming applications
  • applications requiring high-throughput and low-latency processing
  • companies looking for robust fault-tolerance in distributed systems

Google Cloud Pub/Sub videos

No Google Cloud Pub/Sub videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Apache Flink videos

GOTO 2019 • Introduction to Stateful Stream Processing with Apache Flink • Robert Metzger

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Apache Flink Tutorial | Flink vs Spark | Real Time Analytics Using Flink | Apache Flink Training
  • Tutorial - How to build a modern stream processor: The science behind Apache Flink - Stefan Richter

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Apache Flink)
Stream Processing
47 47%
53% 53
Big Data
0 0%
100% 100
Data Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Web Service Automation
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Flink should be more popular than Google Cloud Pub/Sub. It has been mentiond 42 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub mentions (15)

  • Event-Driven Architecture 101
    Secondly, Go is incredibly easy to learn and in my opinion, maintain. This means that if you're a growing company and expect to onboard new teams and team members, having Go as a basis for your systems should mean that new engineers can get up to speed quickly.  Below is a small sample application that can connect to Google PubSub, subscribe to a topic, send an event and then clean up. In total, its 82 lines of... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Top 6 message queues for distributed architectures
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully-managed, globally scalable and secure queue provided by Google Cloud for asynchronous processing messages. Cloud Pub/Sub has many of the same advantages and disadvantages as SQS due to also being cloud hosted. It has a free and paid tier. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Job Scheduling on Google Cloud Platform
    Cloud Pub/Sub: A global messaging service for event-driven architectures. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Effortlessly Scale Your Applications with FaaS: Learn How Functions as a Service Can Help You Grow and Thrive
    Google Cloud Functions is a FaaS offering from Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It allows developers to run their code in response to events, such as changes in a database or the arrival of a message in a Pub/Sub topic. Like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions can be used to build a variety of applications, including serverless websites, data processing pipelines, and real-time data streams. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Mixing GCloud and F#
    That gets triggered when a Pub/Sub topic is fired (from the webhook function). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
View more

Apache Flink mentions (42)

  • When plans change at 500 feet: Complex event processing of ADS-B aviation data with Apache Flink
    I wrote a python based aircraft monitor which polls the adsb.fi feed for aircraft transponder messages, and publishes each location update as a new event into an Apache Kafka topic. I used Apache Flink — and more specially Flink SQL, to transform and analyse my flight data. The TL;DR summary is I can write SQL for my real-time data processing queries — and get the scalability, fault tolerance, and low latency... - Source: dev.to / 1 day ago
  • What is Apache Flink? Exploring Its Open Source Business Model, Funding, and Community
    Continuous Learning: Leverage online tutorials from the official Flink website and attend webinars for deeper insights. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Is RisingWave the Next Apache Flink?
    Apache Flink, known initially as Stratosphere, is a distributed stream processing engine initiated by a group of researchers at TU Berlin. Since its initial release in May 2011, Flink has gained immense popularity in both academia and industry. And it is currently the most well-known streaming system globally (challenge me if you think I got it wrong!). - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Every Database Will Support Iceberg — Here's Why
    Apache Iceberg defines a table format that separates how data is stored from how data is queried. Any engine that implements the Iceberg integration — Spark, Flink, Trino, DuckDB, Snowflake, RisingWave — can read and/or write Iceberg data directly. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    The last decade saw the rise of open-source frameworks like Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, and Apache Samza. These offered more flexibility but still demanded significant engineering muscle to run effectively at scale. Companies using them often needed specialized stream processing engineers just to manage internal state, tune performance, and handle the day-to-day operational challenges. The barrier to entry... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Apache Flink, you can also consider the following products

Apache Kafka - Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.

Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

Amazon Kinesis - Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Spring Framework - The Spring Framework provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform.

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

PieSync - Seamless two-way sync between your CRM, marketing apps and Google in no time