Google Inc. has introduced a much-needed messaging service for its public cloud that aims to take more of the hassle out of running online applications. The addition is the latest milestone in an ongoing effort to catch up with the competition on functionality.

The search giant has made up a lot of ground in recent months, having introduced not one but two tools for tracking different operational characteristics of cloud workloads. It most recently launched an open-source framework called PerfKit that adds visibility into key performance metrics on top of that, thereby leveling the monitoring playing field against other major providers.

The newly introduced Pub/Sub service takes the fight down the stack to the middleware that provides the scaffolding supporting cloud applications. It’s a metered implementation of the technology handling the flow of data among Google’s own systems that offers to automate the distributing of data to the different components of an environment.

The main reason for a developer to use Pub/Sub over one of the open-source messaging systems available out there is simplicity. While free alternatives such as the LinkedIn Inc.-developed Kafka and RabbitMQ may be available at no charge, the net cost of manually sorting out the deployment and then maintaining the setup on a continued basis can add up to much more than the 40 cents Google is charging per million messages.

That’s less that the 50 cents Amazon is charging for every million requests passing through the brokering service on its competing public cloud, which can add up to noticeable savings with volume. Moreover, Google offers volume discounts that can bring down the rate over 85 percent. The only catch is that the search giant is enforcing message quotas while Pub/Sub is still in beta that may make it difficult to accommodate some larger environments.

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