Migrate a Google Cloud Pub/Sub Lite workload to standard Pub/Sub or Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache Kafka

Verified steps

1. Confirm status: Pub/Sub Lite is deprecated and was turned down effective June 30, 2026 for existing customers; it has not accepted new customers since September 24, 2024, so any remaining Lite workload must move off
2. Choose a target: use standard Pub/Sub for global routing, exactly-once delivery, dead-letter topics, and message replication; use Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache Kafka if you need partition-ordered, Kafka-protocol-compatible semantics similar to Lite's partition model
3. Follow the official migration guide for 'migrate-pubsub-lite-to-pubsub' or 'migrate-pubsub-lite-to-managed-service-for-apache-kafka' depending on the chosen target
4. Recreate topic/subscription (or Kafka topic) configuration, since Lite's zonal/regional partition model, capacity reservations, and export subscriptions do not map 1:1 onto Pub/Sub's globally routed topics or Kafka's partitioned topics
5. Update publisher/subscriber client libraries from the Pub/Sub Lite client to the standard Pub/Sub client (or a Kafka client, for Managed Service for Apache Kafka) and repoint bootstrap/endpoint configuration
6. Validate ordering behavior: Lite used per-partition ordering, Pub/Sub uses per-key ordering (ordering keys), and Kafka uses per-partition ordering — adjust producer partitioning/ordering-key logic to match the new model