Overprovisioned Throughput in Pub/Sub Lite

ChatGPT (Validated by Taylor Houck)

Service Category

Other

Cloud Provider

GCP

Service Name

GCP Pub/Sub Lite

Inefficiency Type

Overprovisioned Resource Allocation

Explanation

Pub/Sub Lite is a cost-effective alternative to standard Pub/Sub, but it requires explicitly provisioning throughput capacity. When publish or subscribe throughput is overestimated, customers continue to pay for unused capacity — similar to idle virtual machines or overprovisioned IOPS. This inefficiency is often found in development environments or early-stage production workloads where traffic patterns are unpredictable or have since decreased.

Relevant Billing Model

* Billed based on provisioned publish and subscribe throughput (measured in MiB/s) * Billed based on storage used for retained messages * Charges accrue regardless of actual usage, based on the configured throughput capacity

Detection

Identify topics with provisioned throughput that significantly exceeds average or peak usage
Review historical usage trends for sustained underutilization of publish or subscribe capacity
Assess whether retained message storage aligns with actual replay or analytics needs
Confirm whether the provisioned throughput matches updated workload characteristics
Evaluate dev/test environments where capacity is set and forgotten

Remediation

Reduce provisioned throughput to better match actual traffic levels
Consider right-sizing both publish and subscribe throughput independently
Archive or delete unused topics with retained throughput settings
Implement monitoring alerts for sustained low throughput utilization
Reassess whether Pub/Sub Lite is still the optimal choice vs. standard Pub/Sub or another messaging service

Relevant Documentation

Pub/Sub Lite Pricing
Capacity and Throughput Management
Monitoring Throughput Usage

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