Cloud Tasks is a managed queue service for asynchronous workloads. Decouple services, control rate limits, and implement reliable retries without managing queue infrastructure.
What is Cloud Tasks?
Cloud Tasks accepts tasks into queues and reliably delivers them to HTTP endpoints or App Engine services. The service handles queuing, rate limiting, retries with exponential backoff, and delayed execution.
Unlike synchronous API calls, Cloud Tasks enables decoupling of producer and consumer. The producer creates the task and is immediately done. Cloud Tasks guarantees delivery.
Core Features
- Rate Limiting: Controlled dispatch rate per queue
- Retries with Backoff: Automatic retry on failures
- Delayed Execution: Schedule tasks up to 30 days in the future
- Deduplication: Same tasks are not executed twice
- OIDC/OAuth: Secure authentication to target services
Cloud Tasks vs. Pub/Sub
| Criteria | Cloud Tasks | Pub/Sub |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Task queue | Pub/Sub messaging |
| Delivery | Exactly once | At least once |
| Targets | HTTP/App Engine | Push/Pull subscriptions |
| Rate Limiting | Per queue | Per subscription |
| Scheduling | Yes (up to 30 days) | No |
| Fan-Out | No | Yes (multiple subscribers) |
| Use Case | Targeted task execution | Event streaming |
Typical Use Cases
Asynchronous Email Sending
Instead of sending emails synchronously, create a task. Cloud Tasks guarantees delivery to the email service with automatic retries on temporary failures.
Rate-Limited API Calls
External APIs often have rate limits. Cloud Tasks distributes requests evenly over time and prevents throttling or account suspension.
Delayed Processing
Reminder emails, time-triggered actions, or cleanup jobs. Cloud Tasks executes tasks at the scheduled time, up to 30 days in the future.
Microservice Decoupling
Service A creates tasks, Service B processes them. No direct dependency, Service B can be offline. Cloud Tasks buffers and delivers later.
Benefits
- Reliable: Guaranteed delivery with configurable retries
- Scalable: From individual tasks to millions per day
- Simple: No queue infrastructure to manage
- Affordable: 1 million free operations per month
Integration with innFactory
As a Google Cloud Partner, innFactory supports you with Cloud Tasks: architecture of asynchronous systems, queue design, and integration into existing microservices.
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Cloud Tasks?
Cloud Tasks is a fully managed service for asynchronous task queues. You create tasks that call HTTP endpoints or App Engine services. Cloud Tasks handles queuing, rate limiting, retries, and scheduling.
What is the difference between Cloud Tasks and Pub/Sub?
Cloud Tasks is for targeted calls to specific handlers with guaranteed delivery, rate limiting, and scheduling. Pub/Sub is for event streaming with fan-out to multiple subscribers. Cloud Tasks offers more control over individual tasks, Pub/Sub better scaling at high throughput.
How does Cloud Tasks differ from Cloud Scheduler?
Cloud Scheduler executes jobs on schedule (cron). Cloud Tasks manages queues of individual tasks with rate limiting and retries. Often both are combined - Scheduler triggers periodically, Tasks processes the work asynchronously.
What retry options does Cloud Tasks offer?
Cloud Tasks supports configurable retries with exponential backoff. You define maximum attempts, minimum and maximum backoff time. Tasks remain in the queue up to 31 days until successful or maximum is reached.
How much does Cloud Tasks cost?
Cloud Tasks costs $0.40 per million operations. An operation is creating, deleting, or executing a task. The first 1 million operations per month are free.
