The Google App Engine blog is moving!

Since this blog's inception, Google App Engine has gone from the primary component of our nascent Cloud Platform to one of the many services we offer developers building in the cloud. In recognition of the growth of the platform in both usage and number of components, it's time to take a more holistic approach to our communications channels. With this in mind, we are introducing a new, comprehensive Google Cloud Platform blog.

The Google Cloud Platform blog will be the home for all new App Engine blog content: the release updates, tips and tricks and customer stories you've grown accustomed to finding here. You'll still be able to read existing posts in the archives, and all links to this blog should continue to function.

App Engine has been, and continues to be, one of the cornerstones of our vision for developing in the cloud. It has been exciting to see what over 300,000 of you have built and we can’t wait to see what you do next.

-Posted by Chris Ramsdale, Product Manager

Tune in live to Google Cloud Platform at Google I/O 2013

Google I/O 2013 is only a week away!  We look forward to sharing updates across Google Cloud Platform.  Here’s everything you need to know to keep up with the latest happenings at I/O.

This year, we will have a Google Cloud Platform track kickoff given by Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure, on Wednesday, May 15th at 12:45 PM Pacific. You can watch the stream on the I/O Live Stream page.  Urs will make a few special announcements, so you won’t want to miss it.

At I/O, we have an entire Cloud Platform track complete with code labs and conference sessions. Even if you aren’t attending, you can still tune in to the following sessions on the live stream, which you’ll also be able to find on the homepage of cloud.google.com:

• Track Kickoff: Ushering in the Next Generation of Cloud Computing (5/1512:45PM PT)
• From Nothing to Nirvana in Minutes: Cloud Backend for Your Android Application (5/16 3:30PM PT)
• What’s New and Cool with Google Compute Engine (5/15 3:50PM PT)
• A New Language for App Engine (5/16 3:30PM PT)

All of our sessions (including the live ones above) will be available on demand as soon as we can get them posted.  We’ll post live updates on Google+ and Twitter, so be sure to follow us and take part in the conversation.  

Until I/O!

-Posted by Zafir Khan, Product Marketing Manager

Bringing Debian to Google Compute Engine

This was an exciting week for the Debian community who released Debian 7.0 “wheezy” that brings big improvements including hardened security, improved 32/64-bit compatibility and addresses a lot of community feedback.  Today we’re adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine.  Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 “wheezy” and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 “squeeze.”   This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine.

For fast performance and to reduce bandwidth costs, Google is hosting a Debian package mirror for use by Google Compute Engine Debian instances. We’ve updated our docs and will support Debian via our usual support options or you can also check out what Debian offers.  

We are continually evaluating other operating systems that we can enable with Compute Engine. However, going forward, Debian will be the default image type for Compute Engine.  We look forward to hearing your feedback.

-Posted by Jimmy Kaplowitz, Site Reliability Engineer and Debian developer

Automatically Process Cloud Storage Uploads with Change Notifications

Do your customers upload files to Google Cloud Storage for your applications to process? For example, a photo app may want to create thumbnails of new images as soon as they are uploaded. Normally you would have to poll for updated objects which can be a resource waste or cause you to react slowly. Most times writing and deploying custom scripts to trigger your application is cumbersome.

Today, we're releasing object change notification as a preview feature, allowing you to watch your Google Cloud Storage buckets for new, modified, or deleted objects with a webhook you provide. Now your application can be automatically triggered when an important change happens and start processing data immediately. We've also updated gsutil with a notifyconfig command. A Google App Engine webhook can be as simple as the following:

We're also releasing an update to the Google Cloud Storage JSON API, bringing it into parity with our existing XML API, including exposing new methods such as Copy and Compose. As a part of this release, we are making the API available to everyone without requiring an invitation.

Enjoy, and as always, we watch StackOverflow.

- Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager

App Engine 1.7.7 Released

3 weeks following our last release, the App Engine team is happy to announce 1.7.7.  We plan to deliver our Google I/O release next month.  

Outbound sockets moved to Preview
Outbound sockets is now in preview in this release for Java and Python.  With outbound sockets, billing-enabled App Engine applications can now make outbound connections with TCP or UDP sockets.  This allows developers to build applications that weren’t previously possible on App Engine, such as IMAP or DNS clients.

In the Python runtime, we’ve added support for the Python SSL Library, so you can now open secure connections to remote services such as Apple’s Push Notification service. Similarly, Java developers can now use the javax.net.ssl package to make outbound SSL connections.

Java 7 runtime upgraded to General Availability

The App Engine team is committed to quickly releasing features to General Availability.  You may recall we announced that the Java 7 runtime was in preview just 2 months ago.  Since then we have seen 200% adoption week over week, and today are happy to announce the General Availability of the runtime.  

In order to help developers move over, all app deployments initiated using the new 1.7.7 SDK will use Java 7 unless you explicitly opt out with a command line flag.  In the near future, we plan to automatically update all existing Java 6 applications to Java 7.  Most applications shouldn’t be affected by this change, but we encourage you to start testing your application in advance.  For more compatibility information, we suggest that you check out the Java SE 7 and JDK 7 Compatibility notes.

Google App Engine Maven Plugin

The Google App Engine Maven plugin has been updated to support new goals: now you can directly enhance Datanucleus classes, and generate Google Cloud Endpoints service discovery and client libraries.

Improving the developer experience - goodbye $2.10!

We’re happy to announce that billing-enabled applications will no longer be required to spend a minimum of $2.10 per week. This means that you can enable billing for a free tier application and continue running within the free tier without concern that a spike in traffic will terminate serving (note that you can always specify a daily dollar budget). The minimum spend was originally intended to prevent abuse and ensure that we can offer a stable, reliable system with a free tier.  We have determined that we can continue to support the free tier, without relying on the minimum spend.  So, goodbye $2.10!

Cloud SDK Preview

In our continuing effort to make developers’ lives easier, we are happy to share with you a preview release of the Google Cloud SDK which includes everything from the App Engine SDKs for Java, Python or Go as well as all the tools needed to target Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery in one easy-to-use package.  Please try it out; we are eager to hear your feedback.

A note on reliability improvements

A key benefit of running on a managed service like App Engine is the changes that occur behind the scenes that automatically improve the performance of your applications.  In just the past two months, we’ve made many such improvements:

• Faster and more consistent deployments.  Many customers are seeing up to 10x reductions in time to deploy a new application version.
• We have fully deployed an entirely new scheduler system which autoscales applications more smoothly and efficiently.

• Admin console dashboard charts and current load/error reports have moved to a new, more reliable backend
• The release version of App Engine is now visible in the Admin Console and in request logs
• Several stability and scheduling improvements to Task Queue

The complete list of features and bug fixes for 1.7.7 can be found in our release notes. For App Engine coding questions and answers check us out on Stack Overflow, and for general discussion and feedback, find us on our Google Group.

- Posted by Chris Ramsdale, Product Manager

Google Compute Engine - Expanded Availability, New Features, and Lower Prices

Cross-posted with the Google Developers Blog

Starting today, Google Compute Engine is available to all customers who sign up for our Gold Support package. We’re also happy to announce a 4% reduction on all Compute Engine pricing.

In the nine months since announcing Compute Engine, customers have been using Google’s Infrastructure as a Service product and giving us valuable feedback. Sebastian Stadil of Scalr wrote, in a recent review:

“Google Compute Engine is not just fast. It’s Google fast. In fact, it’s a class of fast that enables new service architectures entirely.”

We’re happy to hear that, because one of our main goals in building Compute Engine is to enable a new generation of applications with direct access to the capabilities of Google’s vast computing infrastructure.

Based on user feedback, we’ve added a number of major features including:

• The option to boot from persistent disks mounted as the root file system, persistent disk snapshots, the ability to checkpoint and restore the contents of network resident persistent disks on demand, and the ability to attach and detach persistent disks from running instances.

• An improved administration console, the Google Cloud Console (preview), which allows you to administer all your Google Cloud Platform services via a unified interface.
  
  

  

  Screenshot of new Cloud Console in action

• Five new instance type families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions of high-memory and high-cpu configurations), with 16 new instance types.

• Two new supported zones in Europe, which provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers. We’ve also made it easy to migrate virtual machine instances from one zone to another via an enhancement to our gcutil command line tool.

• An enhanced metadata server, with the ability to support recursive queries, blocking gets and selectable response formats, along with support for updating virtual machine tags and metadata on running instances (which enables dynamic reconfiguration scenarios).

While we've been hard at work developing new features, we've also had the opportunity to play. Check out the amazing World Wide Maze Chrome Experiment, developed by the Chrome team in Japan. This game converts any web site of your choice into an interactive, three dimensional maze, navigated remotely via your smartphone. Compute Engine virtual machines run Node.js to manage the game state and synchronization with the mobile device, while Google App Engine hosts the game’s web UI. This application provides an excellent example of the new kinds of rich, high performance back end services enabled by Google Cloud Platform.

With today’s announcement, we look forward to welcoming many new customers, and bringing exciting new applications to Google Cloud Platform!

-Posted by Marc Cohen, Developer Relations

Integrate Voice and SMS with Twilio on Google Cloud Platform

Have you ever wanted to integrate SMS or voice communications into your app? We’ve been working with our friends over at Twilio to make it easier to do so. Today we’re announcing native Python and Java libraries for working with Twilio APIs onto Google Cloud Platform.

Lots of apps on App Engine have already been built with phone functionality. Check out the sample code for a group messaging app and the sample code for an app that dispatches voicemails and SMS messages to PagerDuty. Learn how to send business cards via sms through this step by step guide.

You can start building voice and SMS features into your App Engine apps today. Together with Twilio, we’ll help you get started with 2,000 free text message or voice minutes.

Ready to get started?

1. Sign up for App Engine.
2. Get your Twilio account and 2,000 free text message or voice minutes.
3. Check out our guide on how to integrate Twilio services into your app.

Here’s a quick peek at how easy it can be to send a text message from App Engine using Python. After installing the Twilio library, it just takes a few lines of code to send an SMS.

-Posted by Robert Do, Product Marketing Manager