Data Engineer | Scala/Spark Developer
Building a Scalable Notification Pipeline in GCP for Customer Engagement with AI chatbot for a Startup Company

Building a Scalable Notification Pipeline in GCP for Customer Engagement with AI chatbot for a Startup Company

Sairaghu Adepu's photo
Sairaghu Adepu
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2 min read

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In today’s digital landscape, customer engagement plays a crucial role in business success. Automating SMS and Email notifications can significantly enhance customer interactions, ensuring timely communication. This blog will walk through the implementation of an end-to-end notification pipeline using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to send SMS and Email notifications when a customer signs up on a website. Project Overview The goal of this project is to create a scalable and automated notification system that:

  1. Stores customer details in a database upon signup.
  2. Extracts customer details through a daily ETL pipeline.
  3. Sends an SMS notification immediately after signup.
  4. Waits 10 minutes before sending an Email notification.
  5. Logs success/failure details for monitoring and analytics.
  6. Implements error handling and retry mechanisms.

Tech Stack Used • Google Cloud Composer: Orchestrating the entire workflow using Apache Airflow. • Google Cloud Pub/Sub: Event-driven message passing for notifications. • Cloud Functions: Processing and sending notifications. • Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM): Sending SMS notifications. • SendGrid (via GCP): Sending Email notifications. • BigQuery: Storing logs for analytics and monitoring. • Cloud Storage: Archiving notification history. • Google Chat/Slack: Sending failure alerts for quick issue resolution

Implementation Steps

  1. Storing Customer Details Upon user signup, the customer’s details (name, phone, email) are stored in a relational database (e.g., Cloud SQL or Firestore).
  2. ETL Pipeline for Data Extraction A daily ETL pipeline, orchestrated via Cloud Composer, extracts new signups and pushes the data into a Pub/Sub topic for processing.
  3. Sending SMS Notification A Cloud Function subscribed to the Pub/Sub topic triggers an SMS notification using Firebase Cloud Messaging.
  4. Introducing Delay Before Email Notification A delay queue using Pub/Sub retry settings ensures that the Email notification is sent 10 minutes after the SMS.
  5. Sending Email Notification Once the delay expires, another Cloud Function sends an Email using SendGrid.
  6. Logging and Monitoring Each notification’s success/failure is logged into BigQuery for dashboarding and analytics. If a notification fails, it is retried using a delay queue. Persistent failures trigger an alert in Google Chat or Slack.

Error Handling and Scalability Considerations • Retry Mechanism: Pub/Sub retries failed messages based on a configured policy. • Alerting: Google Chat or Slack notifications inform the team of failures. • Scalability: Cloud Functions and Pub/Sub allow auto-scaling for high traffic. • Monitoring Dashboards: BigQuery visualizations help track notification success rates. Conclusion This GCP-based notification pipeline ensures reliable, scalable, and efficient customer engagement. With real-time alerts, retries, and comprehensive monitoring, businesses can improve communication and enhance user experience. Stay tuned for more insights on building scalable cloud-based solutions!