Google Cloud Storage introduces Cloud Pub/Sub notifications
Brandon Yarbrough
Software Engineer, Google Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage has always been a high-performance and cost-effective place to store data objects. Now it’s also easy to build workflows around those objects that are triggered by creating or deleting them, or changing their metadata.
Suppose you want to take some action every time a change occurs in one of your Cloud Storage buckets. You might want to automatically update sales projections every day when sales uploads its new daily totals. You might need to remove a resource from a search index when an object is deleted. Or perhaps you want to update the thumbnail when someone makes a change to an image. The ability to respond to changes in a Cloud Storage bucket gives you increased responsiveness, control and flexibility.
Cloud Pub/Sub Support
We’re pleased to announce that Cloud Storage can now register changes by sending change notifications to a Google Cloud Pub/Sub topic. Cloud Pub/Sub is a powerful messaging platform that allows you to build fast, reliable and more secure messaging solutions. Cloud Pub/Sub support introduces many new capabilities to Cloud Storage notifications, such as pulling from subscriptions instead of requiring users to configure webhooks, multiplexing copies of each message to many subscribers and filtering messages by event type or prefix.
You can get started sending Cloud Storage notifications to Cloud Pub/Sub by reading our getting started guide. Once you’ve enabled the Cloud Pub/Sub API and downloaded the latest version of the gcloud SDK, you can set up notification triggers from your Cloud Storage bucket to your Cloud Pub/Sub topic with the following command:
From that point on, any changes to the contents of your Cloud Storage bucket trigger a message to your Cloud Pub/Sub topic. You can then create Cloud Pub/Sub subscriptions on that topic and pull messages from those subscriptions in your programs, like in this example Python app.
Cloud Functions
Cloud Pub/Sub is a powerful and flexible way to respond to changes in a bucket. However, for some tasks you may prefer the simplicity of deploying a small, serverless function that just describes the action you want to take in response to a change. For that, Google Cloud Functions supports Cloud Storage triggers.
Cloud Functions is a quick way to deploy cloud-based scripts in response to a wide variety of events, for example an HTTP request to a certain URL, or a new object in a Cloud Storage bucket.
Once you get started with Google Cloud Functions, you can learn about setting up a Cloud Storage Trigger for your function. It’s as simple as adding a “--trigger-bucket” parameter to your deploy function:
It’s fun to think about what’s possible when Cloud Storage objects aren’t just static entities, but can trigger a wide variety of tasks. We hope you’re as excited as we are!
