Professional Data EngineerBuilding and operationalizing data processing systemsEasy

A global ride-sharing company collects real-time GPS coordinates from millions of active vehicles. This data needs to be ingested into a scalable, low-latency messaging system that can handle extremely high throughput and fan-out to multiple downstream processing services (e.g., for real-time mapping, analytics, and driver incentives). Which Google Cloud service is best suited for this ingestion requirement?

  1. ACloud Storage
  2. BCloud SQL
  3. CCloud Pub/Sub
  4. DBigQuery
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Cloud Pub/Sub

Cloud Pub/Sub is a highly scalable, asynchronous messaging service designed for real-time data ingestion and fan-out to multiple subscribers, perfectly matching the requirements for high-throughput GPS data.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Cloud Storage is an object storage service, suitable for batch ingestion or static data, not real-time messaging.
  • B. Cloud SQL is a relational database service, not designed for high-throughput, real-time messaging ingestion.
  • D. BigQuery is a data warehouse for analytics, not a real-time messaging ingestion service.

Cloud Pub/Sub

A global, scalable, and asynchronous messaging service that decouples senders and receivers, enabling real-time data ingestion and event-driven architectures.

  • High throughput and low latency.
  • Supports fan-out to multiple subscribers.
  • Durable message storage.

Memory trick: Pub/Sub publishes messages to many subscribers.

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