Cloud Asset Inventory provides broad, organization-wide visibility across Google Cloud resources, Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, and metadata history. Its architecture is designed for compliance tracking, scheduled audits, and analytics, and not as a synchronous control plane. Because of this, Cloud Asset Inventory isn't suitable for real-time, mission-critical dependencies where missing or stale asset data could break production availability or security enforcement.

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Before architecting solutions involving Cloud Asset Inventory, it helps to understand its
consistency model so you can build robust software:

- **Eventual consistency**: Cloud Asset Inventory uses periodic data synchronization.
  Because of this, newly provisioned or modified resources might not be
  immediately queryable. Indexing delays are possible; as a result, state
  changes can take time to propagate across search queries, feeds, and exports.

- **Potential for data/event loss**: When receiving information from other
  Google Cloud services, there might be temporary drops, lag, or out-of-order
  deliveries.

The following table includes scenarios for when it's better to use
Cloud Asset Inventory or a service's API directly.

| Architectural need | Use Cloud Asset Inventory | Use the service API directly |
| Security and compliance | Scheduled compliance audits, IAM policy analysis, and drift reporting. | Real-time inline threat blocking or immediate access revocation. |
| Inventory management | Multi-project batch asset cataloging, BigQuery exports, and cost allocation. | Live source of truth for runtime/data plane application state. |
| Change tracking | Asynchronous notifications for delay-tolerant infrastructure updates through Pub/Sub. | Trigger immediate, synchronized orchestration dependencies. |
|---|---|---|

When designing services that consume Cloud Asset Inventory data, keep the following
guidelines in mind.

## Query Google Cloud APIs directly for immediate state

If a critical service requires instant validation (for example, verifying a
firewall rule before traffic cutover), call the corresponding service's API
instead of Cloud Asset Inventory.

## Design resilient, idempotent consumers

Treat Cloud Asset Inventory Pub/Sub feeds as informative signals. Ensure
consumers handle delayed or out-of-sequence events gracefully.

## Design for asynchronous data serving

Use Cloud Asset Inventory primarily for out-of-band analytics, dashboards, and background
reconciliation loops. Build with the understanding that data updates from
primary sources of truth might experience synchronization lag.