Mete Atamel

If you’re looking to upskill in Generative AI (GenAI), there’s a Generative AI Learning Path in Google Cloud Skills Boost. It currently consists of 10 courses and provides a good foundation on the theory behind Generative AI and what tools and services Google provides in GenAI. The best part is that it’s completely free!

As I went through these courses myself, I took notes, as I learn best when I write things down. In this part 1 of the blog series, I want to share my notes for courses 1 to 6, in case you want to quickly read summaries of these courses.

Workflows just released a new connector for Batch that greatly simplifies how to create and run Batch jobs from Workflows. Let’s take a look how you can use the new Batch connector of Workflows.

Recap: Batch and Workflows

Batch is a fully managed service to schedule, queue, and execute batch jobs on Google’s infrastructure. These batch jobs run on Compute Engine VM instances but they are managed by Batch service, so you don’t have to provision and manage VM instances yourself.

I’ve been covering different aspects of AsyncAPI in my recent blog posts. In this final post of my AsyncAPI blog post series, I want to talk about how to document Google Cloud’s Pub/Sub using AsyncAPI.

AsyncAPI has pretty good support for Google Pub/Sub, thanks to contributions from Jeremy Whitlock, an engineer from Google, and the flexibility baked in AsyncAPI spec. Jeremy also has a nice blog post on this topic that you can read for more details.

I’ve been recently talking about CloudEvents and AsyncAPI,two of my favorite open-source specifications for event-driven architectures. In this blog post, I want to talk about how you can use CloudEvents and AsyncAPI together. More specifically, I’ll show you how to document CloudEvents enabled services using AsyncAPI, thanks to the flexibility and openness of both projects.

Recap: CloudEvents and AsyncAPI

Let’s first do a quick recap CloudEvents and AsyncAPI.

In AsyncAPI, a channel can have a publish and subscribe operation. This can be confusing, depending on which perspective you’re considering (server vs. user) and what you’re comparing against (eg. WebSocket).

In this blog post, I want to go through an example to show you how to construct your AsyncAPI file with the right publish and subscribe semantics. As a bonus, I also show you how to refactor your AsyncAPI files with common configuration.

In my previous post, I talked about basic of AsyncAPI. In this post, I want to get into more details on some tools around AsyncAPI.

More specially, we’ll install AsyncAPI CLI and Generator, generate a sample AsyncAPI definition, visualize it in AsyncAPI Studio, and generate code from it. You’ll see how useful AsyncAPI can be in documenting and maintaining your event-driven architectures.

Install AsyncAPI tools

First, let’s install some of the AsyncAPI tools.

Recently, I’ve been looking into AsyncAPI, an open-source specification and tools to document and maintain event-driven architectures (EDAs).

In this blog post, I want summarize the basics of AsyncAPI and point to some useful links to learn more. In future blog posts, I’ll get into more details of AsyncAPI.

AsyncAPI: Why? What?

AsyncAPI is an open source initiative with the goal of making event-driven APIs as easy as REST APIs. Fundamentally, it is a specification to define asynchronous APIs, similar to what OpenAPI (aka Swagger) does for REST APIs.

Cloud Tasks is a fully-managed service that manages the execution, dispatch, and asynchronous delivery of a large number of tasks to App Engine or any arbitrary HTTP endpoint. You can also use a Cloud Tasks queue to buffer requests between services for more robust intra-service communication.  

Cloud Tasks introduces two new features, the new queue-level routing configuration and BufferTask API. Together, they enable creating HTTP tasks and adding to a queue without needing the tasks client library.

If you use Workflows, you’ve been crafting your Workflows definitions in YAML (or JSON). You’re probably painfully aware of the limited support you get in your IDE with syntax validation or auto-completion with these YAML definitions. This was due to Workflow’s schema being out of date, as I covered in my previous post last year.

I’m happy to report that our team recently updated the Workflows schema with the latest syntax. With a new schema, you get a much improved syntax validation and auto-completion of Workflows definition files in your favorite IDE. 

I talked about CloudEvents in the context of event-driven architectures before. In this post, let’s explore CloudEvents in more depth.

CloudEvents: Why? What?

CloudEvents is a popular specification for describing event data in a common way with the goal of increasing interoperability between different event systems.

Google Cloud’s Eventarc, open-source Knative, Azure’s Event Grid, and many more projects rely on CloudEvent specification to define their event formats.