cloud-test: May 2012

While the Search API was a feature that was just so exciting we couldn’t wait to share it, we still have our regularly scheduled release for May full of new offerings, fixes and refinements with a little something for everyone.

Search API
For the Search API, we’ve included a change that displays the current experimental quota limits in the Admin Console. We've also made several bug fixes and small naming changes in the API to improve consistency.

Service Refinements
As a result of the Master/Slave datastore deprecation, new users will no longer be able to create new Master/Slave applications. We strongly suggest that developers move their existing Master/Slave applications to HRD.

Feature Updates
We are always looking for ways to remove our system limits so that developers can get the most out of the App Engine platform. With this release, apps that have billing enabled can now configure up to 100 cron jobs.

Lastly, we will be prompting a small percentage of admin console users each week to participate in an optional user satisfaction survey.

Of course, we can’t get to all the new things we have for you here, so don’t forget to read the full release notes for Python, Java, and Go. Stack Overflow for App Engine is an amazing way to get technical help from the community and members of the App Engine team, and we continue the lively discussion about App Engine over on our Google Group.

- Posted by the Google App Engine Team

Interested in working with the Google App Engine team? We are hiring solutions architects to help support our premier customers and engage with the community to broaden the impact of Google's cloud offerings.

Google

Cloud SQL: pick the plan that fits your app

Thursday, May 10, 2012

One of the most requested additions to the Google App Engine platform has been a SQL database, and more than 10,000 developers have signed up for the Google Cloud SQL service since the preview launch last October. Google Cloud SQL automatically provisions and maintains your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services.
Since launch, we’ve been busy working on improving the performance, and adding features like scheduled backups and multihoming to increase availability and improve performance. We are also now offering more powerful instances with up to 4GB of RAM.
Today we are announcing our pricing, which will take effect on June 12th with two options to choose from:

For developers who want to try out the service, or who have lightweight applications - we offer a flexible “per use” pricing scheme. For example, you can get started with a cloud hosted MySQL database for around a dollar per month. You pay for just what you use.

For developers with more traffic, there are packages that offer a discount and help you predict your costs in advance.

Google Cloud SQL is currently in limited preview. If you want to give us a try, start here https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/.

Posted by Joe Faith on behalf of the Google Cloud SQL team

Google

Looking for search? Find it on Google App Engine

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

For almost as long as we can remember, full text search has been one of the top feature requests for Google App Engine. Since our talk at Google I/O last year, we’ve been hard at work getting search ready for our developers, and today we’re happy to announce that we are making it available as an Experimental feature.
The Search API, like many other features of Google App Engine, allows you to take advantage of parts of Google’s infrastructure to add full text search to your application. This release includes a host of features including searching specific fields and ranges as well as more advanced features like scoring and snippeting. Whether you want to index products and search price ranges or just match keywords over articles and comments, the Search API is ready for you to test drive.

To help you start integrating search into your application, we’ve created a sample application and walkthrough and documented our known issues. We are extending a limited free quota for testing during our Experimental period.

As always, we’re grateful to all of our trusted testers for their patience and feedback in preparation for this launch, and we look forward to your feedback on the groups. Happy searching (and finding)!

- Posted by the Google App Engine Full Text Search Team