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Google has released a beta version of a message-oriented middleware tool for connecting disparate applications and services running on its Google Cloud Platform or on customers’ premises.
Dubbed Google Pub/Sub, the middleware is designed to let distributed applications and services communicate with each other via real-time messaging.
The middleware eliminates the need for developers to hardwire service dependencies and lets them accommodate changes in data inputs, data formats and data security polices, Google said in an official description of the technology.
“Publish-and-subscribe messaging helps connect apps and devices that send data into processing pipelines, and back out to other apps, devices, and Google Cloud Platform services for further storage and analysis,” it said.
Google product manager Rohit Khare wrote in a blog post that Google Cloud Pub/Sub helps developers create simpler and more efficient applications. The middleware has been tested quite extensively internally at Google and at customers like Snapchat, he wrote.
According to Google, the middleware is ideal for balancing workloads in network clusters, implementing asynchronous workflows, refreshing distributed caches, logging in to multiple systems and distributing event notifications.
“For example, a service that accepts user signups can send notifications whenever a new user registers, and downstream services can subscribe to receive notifications of the event,” the company noted in the announcement.
Similarly, the middleware can be used to efficiently distribute queued-up tasks to multiple Google Compute Engine instances or enable developers to integrate sensor data gathered from multiple end points with data streamed from other sources.
The Google Cloud Pub/Sub supports by default, up to 10,000 topics and 10,000 messages per second and delivered sub-second notification speeds even when tested at over 1 million messages per second, Khare said.
The beta release of Cloud Pub/Sub continues a string of enhancements that Google has made in recent months to bolster the enterprise-readiness of its growing array of cloud computing technologies. A majority of the announcement has been focused on cloud application performance and monitoring.
Just last week for instance, Google launched a Cloud Platform Status Dashboard for providing customers with performance updates on all its cloud services. The dashboard gives Google’s enterprise customers a way to quickly get information on performance and service disruptions and offers help in finding workarounds while the issue is being mitigated.
In January, Google released a beta version of a software-debugging tool that is designed to give developers a way to detect and mitigate performance bottlenecks in production applications running on Google’s Cloud Platform. Google also recently launched a Google Cloud Monitoring service to give companies a way to monitor performance, capacity and uptime of applications running on its cloud platform.
It’s too soon to say what impact these enhancements will have on enterprise attitudes towards Google’s cloud services. While the company has made modest gains in market share it lags considerably behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft as far as enterprise customer sentiment is concerned.
In a survey on CIO attitudes towards public cloud providers by Piper Jaffray earlier this year, fewer executives cited Google as their preferred cloud vendor for 2015 compared to last year. About 33 percent of the CIOs surveyed cited Amazon as their preferred cloud service provider, 21 picked Microsoft while just 7 percent said Google was their preferred choice.
That number is lower than the 12 percent recorded last year. At the same time, though, enterprises using Google as their cloud service provider said they would increase their use of the company services in 2015.