Is it possible to auto scale number of pods based on pub/sub queue?

[Jeremy Lu]

Say when there are more tasks piling up in cloud pub/sub I would like to fire up more pods/workers to handle the workload, is it possible to do this with google container engine and cloud pub/sub now? Thanks.

[George (Google Cloud Support)]

Hello Jeremy,

You can use the Cloud Monitoring service to monitor your usage of the Google Cloud Pub/Sub API. You can also set up an autoscaler to scale based on a list of standard metrics provided by the Cloud Monitoring service, or a custom Cloud Monitoring metric. 

For details, see Scaling based on Cloud Monitoring Metrics. Search for "PubSub" on the Supported Metrics page of the Cloud Monitoring API to learn which metrics can be monitored programmatically. 

On a side note, Stackdriver Monitoring is in Beta and is not covered by an SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes.

I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

George