Monday, November 7, 2011

App Engine 1.6.0 Out of Preview Release

Three and a half years after App Engine’s first Campfire One, App Engine has graduated from Preview and is now a fully supported Google product. We started out with the simple philosophy that App Engine should be ‘easy to use, easy to scale, and free to get started.’ And with 100 billion+ monthly hits, 300,000+ active apps, and 100,000+ developers using our product every month it’s clear that this philosophy resonates. Thanks to your support, Google is making a long term investment in App Engine!

When we announced our plans to leave preview earlier this year, we made a commitment to improving the service by adding support for Python 2.7, Premier Accounts and Backends as well as several changes launching today:

We are also holding a series of App Engine Office hours via Google+ this week for any users who have questions about how these changes impact their applications. The list of times can be found on the Google Developers events page, with links to join the hangout while the office hours are scheduled.  Also, please don’t hesitate to contact us at appengine_updated_pricing@google.com with any questions or concerns.

In addition to leaving Preview, we have several additional changes to announce today.

Production Changes
For billing enabled apps, we are offering two more scheduler controls and some additional changes:
  • Min Idle Instances: You can now adjust the minimum number of Idle Instances for your application, from 1 to 100. Users who had previously signed up for “Always On” can now set the number of idle instances for their applications using this setting.
  • Max Pending Latency: For applications that care about user facing latency, this slider  allows you to set a limit to the amount of time a request spends in the pending queue before starting up a new instance.
  • Blobstore API: You can now use the Blobstore API without signing up for billing.

Datastore Changes
  • High Replication Datastore Migration Tool: We are releasing an experimental tool that allows you to easily migrate your data from Master/Slave to High Replication Datastore, and seamlessly switch your application’s serving to the new HRD application.
  • Query Planning Improvements: We’ve published an article that details recent improvements to our query planner that eliminate the need for exploding indexes.
Python
  • MapReduce: We are releasing the full MapReduce framework in experimental for Python. The framework includes the Map, Shuffle, and Reduce phases.
  • Python 2.7 in the SDK: The SDK now supports the Python 2.7 runtime, so you can test out your changes before uploading them to production.
Java
  • Memcache API Improvements: The Memcache API for Java now supports asynchronous calls. Additionally, putIfUntouched() and getIdentifiable() now support batch operations.
  • Capability Testing: We’ve added the ability to simulate the capability state of local API implementations to test your application’s behavior if a service is unavailable.
  • Datastore Callbacks: You can now specify actions to perform before or after a put() or delete() call.
The full list of changes with this release can be found in the release notes (Python, Java). We’d love to hear your feedback about this release in the groups. And we’d like to thank you all for investing in our platform for the last three years. We’re excited for this milestone in App Engine history, and we look forward to what the future will bring.

Posted by The App Engine Team

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

When will Python 2.7 support come out of its "experimental" designation?

Marco Carola said...

why there is no SSL support for custom domains yet ? you increased the prices (which was not expected) but forgot your promsise !

Mikhail said...

So, when Google will drop GAE support as Wave, Buzz, and cut off free quotes as in Maps? It is not logical to trust Google anymore.

Anonymous said...

congrats all! this is a huge step, especially all the intangibles like the new SLA and infrastructure changes that are really critical but easy to overlook. fingers crossed for the rollout!

iki said...

Thanks! Esp. for Python 2.7 support in dev_appserver.

Btw, the link to 11/07 docs at download page fails, as the last ones available for download are 10/11.
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/downloads/list

Cliff Williams said...

I love GAE and have built several solutions for clients on it. Luckily I don't have to worry about them dropping support for it like they did with Buzz ,Wave, etc..

All of my GAE apps are built with web2py which allows me to take the exact same code and run it on any system I wish as long as it has Python >2.4. So if Google decides to shutdown GAE tomorrow I could have all of my clients back up and running on AWS or RackSpace or even DreamHost in a matter of hours.

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Lucian Baciu said...

Great! But when will Full Text Search and "OR" queries be finally available?

Steve Phillips said...

"...300,000+ active apps..."

How does GAE define 'active'? Thanks.

Steve Phillips said...

As we all know, Google pissed a lot of people off by changing the way GAE bills apps (by instance hours, a la Amazon's EC2, instead of CPU use as was originally the case for App Engine). As a result, many people are paying on the order of 10x what they originally did.

I just looked at the free quotas, and they seem pretty generous to me. Who's going over 46 million XMPP calls _per day_? I suppose it's probably the 1GB of daily bandwidth in each direction that people go way over? Or the 100 mails/day? All other quotas seems difficult to surpass.

Admittedly I'd totally bought into the "App Engine sucks" rhetoric, but if you're using that much of Google's resources, shouldn't you be paying them?

That said, I personally know people who have relatively low-traffic GAE apps deployed and who will supposedly be taking them down soon due to cost.

Are they forgetting about the free quota or what? What am I missing???

vegai said...

The go language is not mentioned. Is it still supported?

BUGHUNTER said...

STILL NO SSL???

Reza Mohammadi said...

Google has blocked all the apps on App Engine for Iranians.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran there are about 75M Iranian, more than 1% of the population of the world.

So, the availability of this service can't be more than 99% percent.

Anonymous said...

still no SSL maybe support

Anonymous said...

@snarfed.org you seem to work for google... no surprise that you are happy with "all the intangibles like the new SLA and infrastructure changes" .. ha ha they are too intangible .. I can bet that SSL support and the old price scheme would be much more appreciated than these intangible things... let's hope google will add some tangible features in the next release !

Jagadish said...

Charging by the instance hours instead of CPU time looks like an evil move. I am seriously looking at migrating my app to EC2 now.

Unknown said...

You know at first I was disappointed about the price change myself.

My app that was running in the App Engine ended up costing around 71 cents per day. But with a bit of optimization I got it free again.

Yes it was work, but it wasnt a big deal...

Jagadish said...

>But with a bit of optimization I got it free again.

@Carsten Can you tell us how you optimized to bring down instance hours?