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