Cloud Tasks API

Name: Cloud Tasks API API
Brand: Cloud Tasks API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecCloud InfrastructureServerlessoauth216 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Create rate-limited task queues, enqueue HTTP or App Engine work items, and pause, resume, or purge queues on demand. Lets agents reliably hand off work to background workers without managing a queue cluster.

Quickstart

Get started with Cloud Tasks API in minutes using your preferred integration method.

# Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf)
{
  "jentic": {
    "url": "https://api.jentic.com/mcp",
    "auth": "oauth"
  }
}

# Then ask your agent:
"enqueue a cloud task"

# → Jentic returns the GET /events tool with parameter schema, agent executes.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Cloud Tasks API API.

Create queues with configurable max dispatch rate, concurrency, and retry policy

Enqueue tasks that POST to HTTP endpoints with optional OIDC token authentication

Pause and resume queues during incidents to prevent thundering herds

Force-run queued tasks immediately for testing or manual replay

GET STARTED

Start building with Cloud Tasks API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Cloud Tasks is a fully managed service for the asynchronous execution of distributed work items. The API exposes queue and task primitives so you can enqueue HTTP or App Engine targets, control delivery rate, set retry policy, and pause queues during incidents. It is the backbone for offloading long work from request handlers, smoothing traffic spikes, and decoupling producers from consumers without standing up a Kafka or Redis cluster.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Cloud Tasks API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Offload Long Work From Request Handlers

Hand off slow operations like PDF generation, third-party API calls, and bulk emails to a Cloud Tasks queue so the user-facing request returns in milliseconds. The API enqueues an HTTP target with a payload, retry policy, and optional delay, and Cloud Tasks invokes the worker with reliable at-least-once delivery and exponential backoff.

Enqueue a task that POSTs {"order_id": 1234} to https://workers.example.com/generate-invoice with a 5 minute delay and 5 retry attempts

Rate-Limited Outbound Calls

Use a Cloud Tasks queue to throttle calls to a third-party API that imposes strict QPS limits. Configure a max dispatch rate and concurrency on the queue, enqueue every outbound call as a task, and Cloud Tasks paces the workers so the upstream service is never overwhelmed even during spikes.

Create a queue with maxDispatchesPerSecond=10 and enqueue 5,000 tasks that each POST to the partner's webhook endpoint

Incident-Time Queue Pausing

Pause a queue during an outage so tasks accumulate without firing against a broken downstream service, then resume once the service is healthy. Cloud Tasks retains queued items while paused and continues to apply the queue's retry policy on resume, which keeps work in flight without losing items or hammering a recovering system.

Pause queue projects/acme/locations/us-central1/queues/email-out, wait for the downstream alert to clear, then resume the queue

Agent-Controlled Background Work

An AI agent can enqueue follow-up work for itself instead of holding a long synchronous loop. Through Jentic the agent searches for 'enqueue cloud task', loads the tasks.create schema, and submits a task that calls back into the agent's webhook with the next step's input.

Use Jentic to enqueue a task on queue email-out that POSTs the next chunk of work to the agent's resume webhook in 60 seconds

Key Endpoints

16 endpoints — cloud tasks is a fully managed service for the asynchronous execution of distributed work items.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/v2/{+name}/locations

List Cloud Tasks regions for the project

POST

/v2/{+name}:pause

Pause dispatching from a queue

POST

/v2/{+name}:resume

Resume a paused queue

POST

/v2/{+name}:purge

Purge all tasks from a queue

POST

/v2/{+name}:run

Force-run a queued task immediately

GET

/v2/{+name}/locations

List Cloud Tasks regions for the project

POST

/v2/{+name}:pause

Pause dispatching from a queue

POST

/v2/{+name}:resume

Resume a paused queue

POST

/v2/{+name}:purge

Purge all tasks from a queue

POST

/v2/{+name}:run

Force-run a queued task immediately

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

Google OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens for Cloud Tasks are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents receive scoped short-lived access tokens at execution time, and OIDC tokens for invoking private worker services are minted on-demand by the underlying service account.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic with intents like 'enqueue a task' or 'pause cloud tasks queue' and Jentic returns the matching queues or tasks operation with its request schema.

Time to first call

Direct integration with Cloud Tasks: 1-3 days for OAuth setup, queue tuning, and OIDC target wiring. Through Jentic: under 1 hour — search, load schema, execute against an existing queue.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Alternative

Cloud Scheduler API

Time-based recurring fires instead of ad-hoc enqueued work

Use Cloud Scheduler when work runs on a fixed cron; use Cloud Tasks when work is enqueued in response to events

Alternative

Cloud Pub/Sub API

High-throughput publish/subscribe messaging instead of per-task control

Choose Pub/Sub for fan-out and high-throughput streams; choose Cloud Tasks when each work item needs its own retry, rate-limit, and target URL

Complementary

Cloud Run Admin API

Hosts the worker services that Cloud Tasks dispatches to

Pair with Cloud Run when you want a serverless worker pool that auto-scales with the queue's dispatch rate

FAQs

Specific to using Cloud Tasks API API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Cloud Tasks API use?

It uses Google OAuth 2.0 with the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform scope. Through Jentic the OAuth credentials live encrypted in the Jentic vault and the agent only sees a short-lived access token at execution time.

Can Cloud Tasks call private Cloud Run services?

Yes. Configure the task's HTTP target with an OIDC token from a service account that has run.invoker on the target service. Cloud Tasks adds the bearer token to the dispatched request so the worker can be locked down to authenticated callers.

What are the rate limits for the Cloud Tasks API?

Each queue has a configurable maxDispatchesPerSecond and maxConcurrentDispatches that govern how fast tasks are dispatched. The control-plane API for creating queues and enqueuing tasks has its own per-project quota that defaults to several thousand operations per minute.

How do I enqueue a background task through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'enqueue cloud task', load the tasks.create schema, and execute the call against /v2/{parent}/tasks with the HTTP target URL, body, and headers. Jentic returns the schema so the agent does not need to parse Cloud Tasks' resource model by hand.

Is the Cloud Tasks API free?

Cloud Tasks includes a free tier of one million operations per month per billing account and charges per million operations after that. The API itself has no per-call markup.

How do I drain a queue without losing tasks?

Pause the queue with /v2/{name}:pause so new dispatches stop, let in-flight work complete, then resume or purge as needed. Purge removes all queued tasks irreversibly, so use it only when the queued items can be discarded.