Pub/Sub Lite

Google Cloud Pub/Sub Lite is a high-volume, low-cost messaging service designed for workloads that can tolerate zonal availability and require predictable pricing. It uses the same publish-subscribe model as standard Pub/Sub but trades some features for significantly lower costs — making it ideal for high-throughput streaming scenarios where cost efficiency is paramount.

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Pub/Sub Lite vs Standard Pub/Sub

Feature	Pub/Sub (Standard)	Pub/Sub Lite
Availability	Multi-zone (regional)	Single zone (zonal) or multi-zone (regional Lite)
Pricing	Per-message data volume	Reserved capacity (throughput + storage)
Scaling	Fully automatic	Manual partition and capacity management
Throughput	Unlimited (auto-scaled)	Provisioned per partition
Storage	Included in message price	Provisioned separately
Message ordering	Per ordering key	Per partition (like Apache Kafka)
Exactly-once	Supported	Not supported
Dead-letter topics	Supported	Not supported
Push subscriptions	Supported	Not supported
BigQuery export	Supported	Via Dataflow
Global topics	Supported	Not supported

When to Choose Pub/Sub Lite