In this lesson, I am going to briefly list a few use cases for Cloud Pub/Sub. Now, Pub/Sub is used for many things, including real-time event processing. You can use Cloud Pub/Sub to create a real-time, enterprise-wide, data sharing bus. Business events, user interactions, and system failures all can all be tracked and responded to as they occur.

Parallel processing. Pub/Sub can be used to efficiently distribute a large number of tasks. If you were creating a website similar to YouTube, you might wanna kick off many different jobs when a user uploads a new video. You could have one process for re-encoding the video to different resolutions. Another could be used to scan for copyright infringement. And a third process might be used for generating closed captions. All of these tasks and more can happen in parallel using auto-scaling microservices.

Tracking database changes. Pub/Sub is also commonly used to communicate database change events. Any interested services can get a notification for when a record is added, edited, or deleted. Now, these events can be used to sync multiple databases, create incremental backups, or to log all changes for later Big Data analysis.

Streaming Internet of Things data. IoT devices are constantly generating lots of data. You can use Pub/Sub to capture, store, and filter this data so that your services are not overwhelmed with lots of unnecessary notifications.

Now, these are just a few examples. Cloud Pub/Sub is also used to coordinate microservices, ingest data for streaming analytics and data integration pipelines, and much, much more.