GCP Pub/Sub and SaladCloud

Managing Long-Running Tasks on SaladCloud with GCP Pub/Sub

Last Updated: March 17, 2025

Managing Long-Running Tasks on SaladCloud with Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Managing long running tasks, such as molecular simulations, LoRA training, and LLM finetuning, presents unique challenges on SaladCloud, due primarily to the interruptible nature of nodes. At the core of all solutions to this problem are a job queue, and progress checkpoints. The job queue is responsible for distributing tasks to workers, and detecting when a worker has been interrupted. Workloads should save checkpoints of their progress and upload it to cloud storage, so that they can be resumed from the last checkpoint in the event of an interruption. Workers should also upload completed artifacts to cloud storage.

Basic architecture for long-running tasks on SaladCloud

We will be using Google Cloud Pub/Sub as our job queue, and Cloudflare R2, an S3-compatible object storage service, as our cloud storage. We prefer R2 to AWS S3 for many SaladCloud workloads, because R2 does not charge for egress data, and SaladCloud’s distributed nodes are not in datacenters, and therefore may incur egress fees from other providers. Instrumenting your code to use S3-compatible storage will make it easier to switch storage providers in the future if you choose to do so.

For this guide, we will build an application that slowly calculates a sum for n steps, sleeping for 30 seconds between steps to simulate work. We will set up a job queue and related resources, a storage bucket, a checkpoint saving system, and review a simple auto-scaling mechanism.

You will need a Google Cloud account, and a Cloudflare account to follow this guide.

The Job Queue: Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a messaging service that allows you to send and receive messages between independent applications. We will use it to distribute tasks to workers. You can create a new Pub/Sub topic and subscription using the Google Cloud Console.

Relevant Limitations

• Pub/Sub messages can be at most 10MB in size. This means that you should not send large payloads in a single message. Instead, you should send a reference to the payload in cloud storage.
• Pub/Sub messages are not guaranteed to be delivered in order. This means that you should not rely on the order of messages in the queue to determine the order of tasks.
• Pub/Sub is billed primarily based on the amount of throughput you use, in kB. This means there are significant cost savings to only including references to large assets, as opposed to encoding them in the message itself.
• Similar to other hyperscaler clouds, permission management can be complex and painful in Google Cloud. Make sure you understand the IAM roles and permissions you are granting to your Pub/Sub resources.

Creating a Topic and Subscription

Navigate to the GCP Pub/Sub Console and create a new schema called job-schema. This will enable automatic message validation for your topic, which can be useful for ensuring that your workers are receiving the valid jobs.

Use the following JSON schema, defining a Job record with a job_id and steps field:

{
  "type": "record",
  "name": "Job",
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "job_id",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "steps",
      "type": "int"
    }
  ]
}

With this created, navigate to the “Topics” tab, and click “Create Topic”. We’ll call our topic Jobs, and we won’t use the default subscription. Go ahead and select the schema we just created, and use the default google-managed encryption key.

Creating a new topic

Create a second topic called deadletter that we will use for failed jobs. For this one, we do not want the schema, and we do want to enable message retention.

Next, navigate to the “Subscriptions” tab, and click “Create Subscription”. We’ll call our subscription job-workers, and assign it to the jobs topic. We’ll use the “Pull” delivery type, set message retention to the maximum of 31 days, and set it to “Never expire”. We’ll also set the “Acknowledgement deadline” to 60 seconds, which means that if a worker doesn’t acknowledge the message, or extend the deadline within 60 seconds, the message will be handed out to a different worker.

Creating a new subscription

We will enable exactly once delivery, to ensure that our long-running, presumably expensive tasks do not get run more than once. We will also enable dead-lettering, and set the dead-letter topic to the deadletter topic we created earlier. Maximum delivery attempts can be the minimum value of 5. We want failed jobs to be immediately retried.

Creating a new subscription

Once this is created, go ahead and create another subscription called deadletter, and attach it to the deadletter topic. This is where you could attach something to process failed messages, although we will not be covering that in this guide.

Finally, you will need to use the Service Accounts console to create an IAM principal with the Pub/Sub Subscriber permission set. Create a set of JSON service account keys for the new principal, and save the file as keys.json. Add this file to your .gitignore to avoid committing it to your repository.

Cloud Storage: R2

R2 is a cloud storage service from Cloudflare that is compatible with the S3 API. It is a great choice for SaladCloud workloads because it does not charge egress fees, and SaladCloud’s distributed nodes are mostly not in datacenters, and therefore may incur egress fees from other providers.

From the R2 console, navigate to “R2 Object Storage”, and click “Create Bucket”.

The R2 Object Storage Console

Give your bucket a meaningful name, and select an appropriate location. We are going to use the standard storage class, and automatic location.

Creating a new bucket

Once your bucket is created, you will need to create an access key and secret key. Select “Manage API tokens” from the ”{ } API” menu, and click “Create Token”.

You still need an API token to access your bucket

Create a token with “Object Read & Write” permissions, and only grant it access to the bucket we’ve just created. Since secret rotation is outside the scope of this guide, we’re going to use the “forever” TTL. However, it is best practice to user shorter-lived secrets and to have easy automatic mechanisms in place to rotate secrets as needed.

Once created you will be given an access key and secret key. Save these somewhere safe, as you will not be able to retrieve them again. The application code will get these keys from environment variables, so you will need to set them in your environment. Also on that page will be the S3 endpoint URL for your bucket. Save this as well, as it will be needed in the application code.

Instrumenting Our Application

We’re going to use the boto3 library to interact with R2, and the google-cloud-pubsub library to interact with Google Cloud Pub/Sub. You can install these libraries with pip install boto3 google-cloud-pubsub.

First, we need to set up our environment variables. All of the following environment variables will be needed by the application code.

There are several ways to do this, but what I’ve done for my development environment is create a file called worker.env in the root of my project, and add the following lines:

PROJECT_ID=your-gcp-project-id
SUBSCRIPTION_ID=your-pubsub-subscription-id
ACK_DEADLINE_SECONDS=60
R2_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-access-key-id
R2_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-secret-access-key
R2_S3_ENDPOINT_URL=your-s3-endpoint-url
R2_BUCKET_NAME=your-bucket-name
GCP_KEY=B64_ENCODED_GCP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/keys.json

To get the GCP_KEY, you can run the following command:

cat keys.json | base64 -w 0

It is important to use the -w 0 flag to ensure that the base64 encoded string is on a single line.

Then, to source this into my environment when I run my code, I run the following command:

export $(grep -v '^#' worker.env | xargs -d '\n')

Make sure *.env is in your .gitignore. You don’t want to commit your secrets to your repository.

Now, create a file called main.py in the root of your project, and add the following code:

import os
import boto3
import json
import time
import threading
from google.cloud import pubsub_v1

# Get the environment variables
r2_aws_region = "auto"
r2_aws_access_key_id = os.getenv('R2_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID')
r2_aws_secret_access_key = os.getenv('R2_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')
r2_s3_endpoint_url = os.getenv('R2_S3_ENDPOINT_URL')
r2_bucket_name = os.getenv('R2_BUCKET_NAME')

project_id = os.getenv('PROJECT_ID')
subscription_id = os.getenv('SUBSCRIPTION_ID')
ack_deadline_seconds = int(os.getenv('ACK_DEADLINE_SECONDS'))


# Create the R2 client
r2 = boto3.client('s3',
                  aws_access_key_id=r2_aws_access_key_id,
                  aws_secret_access_key=r2_aws_secret_access_key,
                  region_name=r2_aws_region,
                  endpoint_url=r2_s3_endpoint_url)

# Create the Pub/Sub client
subscriber = pubsub_v1.SubscriberClient()
subscription_path = subscriber.subscription_path(
    project_id, subscription_id)

First, let’s look at our simulated workload:

def do_the_actual_work(job: dict, checkpoint: dict, cancel_signal: threading.Event) -> int | None:
    '''
    Do the actual work for the job. This function will simulate work by
    sleeping for 30 seconds and incrementing the step and sum in the
    checkpoint.

    Parameters:
    - job: dict, the job
    - checkpoint: dict, the checkpoint
    '''
    print(f'Starting job {job["job_id"]}', flush=True)
    print(f"Max steps: {job['steps']}", flush=True)
    print(f"Starting step: {checkpoint['step']}", flush=True)
    while checkpoint['step'] < job['steps'] and not cancel_signal.is_set():
        # Simulate work
        print(
            f"Working on job {job['job_id']}, step {checkpoint['step']}", flush=True)
        time.sleep(30)
        if cancel_signal.is_set():
            # If we were interrupted, we need to return None to indicate that
            # the job was interrupted.
            return None
        # Update the checkpoint.
        checkpoint['step'] += 1
        checkpoint['sum'] += checkpoint['step']
        upload_checkpoint(job['job_id'], checkpoint)

    print(f'Job {job["job_id"]} finished')
    return checkpoint['sum']

Next, we want some helper functions to interact with R2:

def download_checkpoint(job_id: str) -> dict:
    '''
    Download the checkpoint from S3

    Parameters:
    - job_id: str, the job ID

    Returns:
    - checkpoint: dict, the checkpoint
    '''
    try:
        response = r2.get_object(
            Bucket=r2_bucket_name,
            Key=f'{job_id}/checkpoint.json'
        )
    except r2.exceptions.NoSuchKey:
        return None

    checkpoint = json.loads(response['Body'].read())
    return checkpoint


def upload_checkpoint(job_id: str, checkpoint: dict) -> None:
    '''
    Upload the checkpoint to S3

    Parameters:
    - job_id: str, the job ID
    - checkpoint: dict, the checkpoint
    '''
    r2.put_object(
        Bucket=r2_bucket_name,
        Key=f'{job_id}/checkpoint.json',
        Body=json.dumps(checkpoint)
    )
    print(f'Checkpoint uploaded for job {job_id}', flush=True)


def upload_result(job_id: str, result: int) -> None:
    '''
    Upload the result to S3

    Parameters:
    - job_id: str, the job ID
    - result: int, the result
    '''
    r2.put_object(
        Bucket=r2_bucket_name,
        Key=f'{job_id}/result.txt',
        Body=str(result)
    )
    print(f'Result uploaded for job {job_id}', flush=True)

Next, we want a function that will periodically extend the message deadline:

def heartbeat_job(ack_id: str, heartbeat_stop_signal: threading.Event, job_stop_signal: threading.Event) -> None:
    '''
    Send a heartbeat to the GCP subscription

    Parameters:
    - receipt_handle: str, the receipt handle of the message
    - heartbeat_stop_signal: threading.Event, a signal to stop the heartbeat
    - job_stop_signal: threading.Event, a signal to stop the main job
    '''
    while not heartbeat_stop_signal.is_set():
        try:
            subscriber.modify_ack_deadline(
                subscription=subscription_path,
                ack_ids=[ack_id],
                ack_deadline_seconds=ack_deadline_seconds
            )
            time.sleep(ack_deadline_seconds // 2)
        except Exception as e:
            print(f"Error in heartbeat: {str(e)}", flush=True)
            job_stop_signal.set()
            break

We also will use some helper functions to interact with Pub/Sub:

def ack_job(ack_id: str) -> None:
    '''
    Acknowledge the job

    Parameters:
    - ack_id: str, the ack ID
    '''
    subscriber.acknowledge(subscription=subscription_path, ack_ids=[ack_id])


def nack_job(ack_id: str) -> None:
    '''
    Reject the job

    Parameters:
    - ack_id: str, the ack ID
    '''
    subscriber.modify_ack_deadline(
        subscription=subscription_path,
        ack_ids=[ack_id],
        ack_deadline_seconds=0
    )

Now, we need a function that ties everything together:

def process_job(job, ack_id):
    print(f"Received job {job['job_id']}", flush=True)

    # Start the heartbeat thread to keep the job alive
    heartbeat_stop_signal = threading.Event()
    job_stop_signal = threading.Event()
    heartbeat_thread = threading.Thread(
        target=heartbeat_job, args=(
            ack_id, heartbeat_stop_signal, job_stop_signal))
    heartbeat_thread.start()

    # If there's a checkpoint, we want to use it, but if not, we need to
    # initialize our state.
    checkpoint = download_checkpoint(job['job_id'])
    if checkpoint is None:
        print('No checkpoint found. Initializing state.', flush=True)
        checkpoint = {'step': 0, 'sum': 0}
    else:
        print(
            f'Found checkpoint, resuming from step {checkpoint["step"]}', flush=True)

    # Some jobs may have a validation step. For instance, dreambooth training may have a step
    # that verifies if all inputs have faces. If the validation fails, we should nack the job.
    if not validate_job(job):
        print(f"Job {job['job_id']} failed validation")
        heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
        nack_job(ack_id)
        return

    # Now we can do the actual work
    try:
        result = do_the_actual_work(job, checkpoint, job_stop_signal)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error in job {job['job_id']}: {str(e)}", flush=True)
        heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
        nack_job(ack_id)
        return

    if result is None:
        # Heartbeat failed, so we need to nack the job
        print(f"Heartbeat for {job['job_id']} failed", flush=True)
        heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
        nack_job(ack_id)
        return

    # Upload the result and ack the message
    upload_result(job['job_id'], result)
    heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
    ack_job(ack_id)
    heartbeat_thread.join()

Finally, we need a function to start the worker:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print("Polling for messages", flush=True)
    while True:
        response = subscriber.pull(
            subscription=subscription_path, max_messages=1, timeout=30)
        if not response or len(response.received_messages) == 0:
            print("No messages received, sleeping for 10s", flush=True)
            time.sleep(10)
            continue

        message = response.received_messages[0]
        ack_id = message.ack_id
        body = json.loads(message.message.data.decode('utf-8'))
        process_job(body, ack_id)

Completed Example

import os
import boto3
import json
import time
import threading
from google.cloud import pubsub_v1

# Get the environment variables
r2_aws_region = "auto"
r2_aws_access_key_id = os.getenv('R2_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID')
r2_aws_secret_access_key = os.getenv('R2_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')
r2_s3_endpoint_url = os.getenv('R2_S3_ENDPOINT_URL')
r2_bucket_name = os.getenv('R2_BUCKET_NAME')

project_id = os.getenv('PROJECT_ID')
subscription_id = os.getenv('SUBSCRIPTION_ID')
ack_deadline_seconds = int(os.getenv('ACK_DEADLINE_SECONDS'))


# Create the R2 client
r2 = boto3.client('s3',
                  aws_access_key_id=r2_aws_access_key_id,
                  aws_secret_access_key=r2_aws_secret_access_key,
                  region_name=r2_aws_region,
                  endpoint_url=r2_s3_endpoint_url)

# Create the Pub/Sub client
subscriber = pubsub_v1.SubscriberClient()
subscription_path = subscriber.subscription_path(
    project_id, subscription_id)


def download_checkpoint(job_id: str) -> dict:
    '''
    Download the checkpoint from S3

    Parameters:
    - job_id: str, the job ID

    Returns:
    - checkpoint: dict, the checkpoint
    '''
    try:
        response = r2.get_object(
            Bucket=r2_bucket_name,
            Key=f'{job_id}/checkpoint.json'
        )
    except r2.exceptions.NoSuchKey:
        return None

    checkpoint = json.loads(response['Body'].read())
    return checkpoint


def upload_checkpoint(job_id: str, checkpoint: dict) -> None:
    '''
    Upload the checkpoint to S3

    Parameters:
    - job_id: str, the job ID
    - checkpoint: dict, the checkpoint
    '''
    r2.put_object(
        Bucket=r2_bucket_name,
        Key=f'{job_id}/checkpoint.json',
        Body=json.dumps(checkpoint)
    )
    print(f'Checkpoint uploaded for job {job_id}', flush=True)


def validate_job(job: dict) -> bool:
    '''
    Validate the job

    Parameters:
    - job: dict, the job

    Returns:
    - bool, whether the job is valid
    '''
    # This is a very simple function for our very simple application.
    # You should replace this with your actual validation logic.
    return 'job_id' in job and 'steps' in job


def upload_result(job_id: str, result: int) -> None:
    '''
    Upload the result to S3

    Parameters:
    - job_id: str, the job ID
    - result: int, the result
    '''
    r2.put_object(
        Bucket=r2_bucket_name,
        Key=f'{job_id}/result.txt',
        Body=str(result)
    )
    print(f'Result uploaded for job {job_id}', flush=True)


def do_the_actual_work(job: dict, checkpoint: dict, cancel_signal: threading.Event) -> int | None:
    '''
    Do the actual work for the job. This function will simulate work by
    sleeping for 30 seconds and incrementing the step and sum in the
    checkpoint.

    Parameters:
    - job: dict, the job
    - checkpoint: dict, the checkpoint
    '''
    print(f'Starting job {job["job_id"]}', flush=True)
    print(f"Max steps: {job['steps']}", flush=True)
    print(f"Starting step: {checkpoint['step']}", flush=True)
    while checkpoint['step'] < job['steps'] and not cancel_signal.is_set():
        # Simulate work
        print(
            f"Working on job {job['job_id']}, step {checkpoint['step']}", flush=True)
        time.sleep(30)
        if cancel_signal.is_set():
            # If we were interrupted, we need to return None to indicate that
            # the job was interrupted.
            return None
        # Update the checkpoint.
        checkpoint['step'] += 1
        checkpoint['sum'] += checkpoint['step']
        upload_checkpoint(job['job_id'], checkpoint)

    print(f'Job {job["job_id"]} finished')
    return checkpoint['sum']


def heartbeat_job(ack_id: str, heartbeat_stop_signal: threading.Event, job_stop_signal: threading.Event) -> None:
    '''
    Send a heartbeat to the GCP subscription

    Parameters:
    - receipt_handle: str, the receipt handle of the message
    - heartbeat_stop_signal: threading.Event, a signal to stop the heartbeat
    - job_stop_signal: threading.Event, a signal to stop the main job
    '''
    while not heartbeat_stop_signal.is_set():
        try:
            subscriber.modify_ack_deadline(
                subscription=subscription_path,
                ack_ids=[ack_id],
                ack_deadline_seconds=ack_deadline_seconds
            )
            time.sleep(ack_deadline_seconds // 2)
        except Exception as e:
            print(f"Error in heartbeat: {str(e)}", flush=True)
            job_stop_signal.set()
            break


def ack_job(ack_id: str) -> None:
    '''
    Acknowledge the job

    Parameters:
    - ack_id: str, the ack ID
    '''
    subscriber.acknowledge(subscription=subscription_path, ack_ids=[ack_id])


def nack_job(ack_id: str) -> None:
    '''
    Reject the job

    Parameters:
    - ack_id: str, the ack ID
    '''
    subscriber.modify_ack_deadline(
        subscription=subscription_path,
        ack_ids=[ack_id],
        ack_deadline_seconds=0
    )


def process_job(job, ack_id):
    print(f"Received job {job['job_id']}", flush=True)

    # Start the heartbeat thread to keep the job alive
    heartbeat_stop_signal = threading.Event()
    job_stop_signal = threading.Event()
    heartbeat_thread = threading.Thread(
        target=heartbeat_job, args=(
            ack_id, heartbeat_stop_signal, job_stop_signal))
    heartbeat_thread.start()

    # If there's a checkpoint, we want to use it, but if not, we need to
    # initialize our state.
    checkpoint = download_checkpoint(job['job_id'])
    if checkpoint is None:
        print('No checkpoint found. Initializing state.', flush=True)
        checkpoint = {'step': 0, 'sum': 0}
    else:
        print(
            f'Found checkpoint, resuming from step {checkpoint["step"]}', flush=True)

    # Some jobs may have a validation step. For instance, dreambooth training may have a step
    # that verifies if all inputs have faces. If the validation fails, we should nack the job.
    if not validate_job(job):
        print(f"Job {job['job_id']} failed validation")
        heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
        nack_job(ack_id)
        return

    # Now we can do the actual work
    try:
        result = do_the_actual_work(job, checkpoint, job_stop_signal)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error in job {job['job_id']}: {str(e)}", flush=True)
        heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
        nack_job(ack_id)
        return

    if result is None:
        # Heartbeat failed, so we need to nack the job
        print(f"Heartbeat for {job['job_id']} failed", flush=True)
        heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
        nack_job(ack_id)
        return

    # Upload the result and ack the message
    upload_result(job['job_id'], result)
    heartbeat_stop_signal.set()
    ack_job(ack_id)
    heartbeat_thread.join()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    print("Polling for messages", flush=True)
    while True:
        response = subscriber.pull(
            subscription=subscription_path, max_messages=1, timeout=30)
        if not response or len(response.received_messages) == 0:
            print("No messages received, sleeping for 10s", flush=True)
            time.sleep(10)
            continue

        message = response.received_messages[0]
        ack_id = message.ack_id
        body = json.loads(message.message.data.decode('utf-8'))
        process_job(body, ack_id)

Submitting Jobs To The Queue

Now we need to populate the queue with jobs. First, we’ll define some environment variables in a new file submitter.env.

PROJECT_ID=your-gcp-project-id
TOPIC_ID=jobs
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/keys.json

I’ve saved mine in a file called submitter.env, and I’m going to source them into my environment with the following command:

export $(grep -v '^#' submitter.env | xargs -d '\n')

Suppose we have a csv with our 10,000 jobs, and we want to submit them all. Our CSV (data.csv) looks like this, with 10,000 rows.

job_id,steps
job-0,600
job-1,600
job-2,600
job-3,600

We can submit all of these jobs with the following code:

import os
import json
import csv
from google.cloud import pubsub_v1

project_id = os.getenv('PROJECT_ID')
topic_id = os.getenv('TOPIC_ID')

publisher = pubsub_v1.PublisherClient(
    batch_settings=pubsub_v1.types.BatchSettings(max_messages=100))
topic_path = publisher.topic_path(project_id, topic_id)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    with open("data.csv") as f:
        reader = csv.DictReader(f)
        for row in reader:
            row["steps"] = int(row["steps"])
            data = bytes(json.dumps(row), 'utf-8')
            publisher.publish(topic_path, data=data)

Running the Job Submitter

To run the job submitter, you can use the following command:

python submitter.py

Containerize the Worker Application

Now that we have our worker application and our job submitter, we can package our worker in a docker container, and run it on a SaladCloud Container Group.

First, let’s make sure our dependencies are documented in requirements.txt.

boto3
google-cloud-pubsub

Now, we’re going to use create a launch script called launch.sh that will decode our base64 encoded GCP service account key, and then run our worker application.

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# GCP_KEY is the base64 encoded service account key, which is used to authenticate with GCP. We want to write it
# to a file so that we can use it to authenticate with GCP.
echo $GCP_KEY | base64 -d > $GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS

# Run the worker
python main.py

Now, create a new file called Dockerfile. Our application is simple, so a basic python base image should be fine.

FROM python:3.10.12-slim-buster

WORKDIR /app

COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

COPY main.py .
COPY launch.sh .
ENV GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/app/credentials.json"

CMD ["./launch.sh"]

Now, build the docker image, and use a tag that makes sense for you.

docker build -t saladtechnologies/lrt-worker-examples:gcp-pub-sub .

Now, we can test it locally to make sure it works, before we deploy it to SaladCloud.

docker run -it --rm  --env-file worker.env saladtechnologies/lrt-worker-examples:gcp-pub-sub

You should see it start up and begin processing a job. Once this is working, you can go ahead and terminate the container with Ctrl+C.

Now, we can push the image to Docker Hub.

docker push saladtechnologies/lrt-worker-examples:gcp-pub-sub

Deploying the Worker to SaladCloud

To deploy our worker to SaladCloud, we need to create a new Container Group. This can be done via the API, SDKs, or the Portal. We’re going to use the Portal.

We’re going to create a new Container Group, and we’re going to use the image we just pushed to Docker Hub. We’re going to request 100 replicas (the max via the portal), and we’re going to set all of our environment variables from worker.env.

Creating a new container group

Our application is extremely simple, so we’re going to only request 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, and no GPU. Your hardware requirements are likely significantly higher than this.

Setting the hardware requirements

All CPU-only jobs are prioritized as “Batch” (the lowest tier), and we don’t need any additional storage for this particular application.

Setting the job priority and storage requirements

We do not need the container gateway, as our application pulls its work from a queue. We also do not need health probes, as those are primarily for services accessed via Container Gateway. Go ahead and hit deploy, and you’ll be taken to the container group page, where you can see its status.

Deploying the container group

After a few minutes, instances should start to become “Running”.

Container group running

Validating That It Works

Now that our cluster is up and running, we can go to the Subscription console, and look at the “metrics” tab to verify there is activity on the subscription.

Active messages in the subscription

From the R2 console, we can see that our bucket is being filled with checkpoints and results.

Checkpoints and results in the R2 bucket

Autoscaling

Now that we have our worker running, we can set up some simple autoscaling to automatically scale the number of replicas up and down based on the number of messages in the queue.

There are many ways to implement autoscaling, but for simplicity, we recommend creating a scheduled task that runs every 5 minutes, and sets the number of replicas to be equal to the number of messages in the queue, limited to 250 replicas (the maximum in the API). To implement this, you can use a serverless function, such as Cloudflare workers, or GCP Cloud Functions

Here is the outline of a python implementation that you can modify to suit your needs.

# This is our ideal number of replicas
total_messages = num_waiting_messages + num_messages_in_flight

# We need to constrain this number by our min and max.
desired_replicas = min(max(min_replicas, total_messages), max_replicas)

container_group = get_container_group()
current_replicas = container_group["replicas"]
print(
    f"Current replicas: {current_replicas}, Desired replicas: {desired_replicas}")

# always one of pending, running, stopped, failed, deploying
current_state = container_group["current_state"]["status"]
print(f"Current state: {current_state}")

if current_state == "stopped" and desired_replicas > 0:
    start_container_group()

if current_state == "running" and desired_replicas == 0:
    stop_container_group()

if desired_replicas != current_replicas:
    set_replicas(desired_replicas)

From the Salad API, you will need the following endpoints:

• Get Container Group
• Start Container Group
• Stop Container Group
• Set Replicas

Conclusion

In this guide, we’ve shown you how to set up a simple long-running task worker on SaladCloud using Google Cloud Pub/Sub as a job queue, and R2 as a storage backend. We’ve also shown you how to deploy the worker to SaladCloud, and how to implement autoscaling based on the number of messages in the queue.