Save messages, money, and time with Pub/Sub topic retention

Starting today, there is a simpler, more useful way to save and replay messages that are published to Pub/Sub: topic retention. Prior to topic retention, you needed to individually configure and pay for message retention in each subscription. Now, when you enable topic retention, all messages sent to the topic within the chosen retention window are accessible to all the topic’s subscriptions, without increasing your storage costs when you add subscriptions. Additionally, messages will be retained and available for replay even if there are no subscriptions attached to the topic at the time the messages are published.

Topic retention extends Pub/Sub’s existing seek functionality–message replay is no longer constrained to the subscription’s acknowledged messages. You can initialize new subscriptions with data retained by the topic, and any subscription can replay previously published messages. This makes it safer than ever to update stream processing code without fear of data processing errors, or to deploy new AI models and services built on a history of messages.

Topic retention explained

With topic retention, the topic is responsible for storing messages, independently of subscription retention settings. The topic owner has full control over the topic retention duration and pays the full cost associated with message storage by the topic. As a subscription owner, you can still configure subscription retention policies to meet your individual needs.