[thezorg]

Poor [Cloud Tasks](https://cloud.google.com/tasks), they're the actual GCP message queue, but everyone forgets they exist and use Pub/Sub instead.

What's funny is Pub/Sub is a fundamentally different model from message queues: queues are normally tightly coupled, meaning you enqueue a message to be processed by a specific system. Pub/Sub on the other hand is fundamentally loosely coupled: the publisher doesn't care who (if anyone) gets the message.

(I've heard "orchestration" vs "choreography" to describe this dichotomy, but I can't say I'm a fan of the jargon.)

[xyzzy_plugh]

Pub/Sub is truly the stuff of nightmares compared to Tasks. I wish Tasks were a little more loved, because I keep ending up using Pub/Sub inevitably.

[candiddevmike]

Pub/Sub is meant to follow the Kafka "insane amounts of data" firehose pattern. Everyone thinks they need that scale unfortunately and skips over Cloud Tasks.

[Spivak]

The Kafka pattern isn't about the size of your data, it's about accommodating heterogeneous consumers and easy fan-out. I don't love the ampq exchange model because it adds state to the middle of the queue.

[sudhirj]

Wasn’t this on AppEngine in the early days? Yeah, if this is the same thing it’s probably the first queue I learnt / used. Will add it in.

[swyx]

(as someone who has pitched orchestration vs choreography) why don’t you like the jargon?