cloud-test: November 2012

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Get started at no cost with a faster, larger Google Cloud SQL database

Thursday, November 8, 2012

You want your application to be fast. Databases play a big role in your overall application speed and end-users’ experience. Reads and writes should execute instantly, even as your user base grows to millions of users, and this requires faster, larger databasesGoogle App Engine is designed to scale. And now Google Cloud SQL, a MySQL database that lives in Google’s cloud, is scaling up alongside App Engine to meet that demand for faster access to more data. With the features we are launching today, you can now work with bigger, faster MySQL databases in the cloud:

More Storage: We’re increasing the available storage on Cloud SQL to 100 GB - ten times more than before.

Faster Reads: We’re increasing the maximum size of instances to 16 GB RAM. This amounts to a 4 times increase in the amount of data you can cache.

Faster Writes: We’re adding optional asynchronous replication, which gives the write performance of a non-replicated database, but the availability of a replicated one.

EU datacenter availability: If you sign up to be a Premier customer, you can choose to store your data and run your Cloud SQL database instance in either our US or EU data centers.

Integration with Google Apps Script: We’re making it quick and easy for businesses using Google Apps to use Cloud SQL. Publish and share your data with Google Sheets, add data to your Google Sites pages or create simple Google Forms without worrying about hosting or configuring servers.

Introducing a new trial offer
We’ve received many requests from users for a trial offer to test out Cloud SQL. Today, we’re introducing a 6- month trial offer at no charge, effective until June 1, 2013, and will include one Cloud SQL instance with 0.5 GB of storage. Sign up now to get started.
Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager, Google Cloud SQL

Google

Upgrading to Python 2.7: simple and practical

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

We launched a major improvement to the Python runtime when we introduced support for Python 2.7 last February. It has since proven to be astonishingly popular – just a few months later more than half of all active Python applications on App Engine are using Python 2.7.

What’s so great about Python 2.7? It isn’t just a language update, it also includes a number of features that can help your apps run much more efficiently.

Increase efficiency with concurrent requests. Now a single frontend instance can handle multiple requests at the same time in separate threads. This means App Engine requires fewer frontend instances to handle the traffic, which can lead to significant cost savings.

Rapidly growing mobile gaming company Pocket Gems reduced the cost of running their front-end instances by 78% when they switched to to the Python 2.7 runtime. “We immediately saw a dramatic difference” said engineering director David Underhill “We only need one third as many instances under Python 2.7 as we did under 2.5 to handle the same traffic”.

Move faster with more native C modules. In Python 2.7 we’ve added more native C modules to App Engine. Core libraries like cPickle run much faster than the equivalent pure Python library available in the Python 2.5 runtime.

Take advantage of popular third-party libraries like PIL and numpy. We’ve greatly expanded the number of third party libraries available for use in App Engine in Python 2.7. So far we’ve added the Python Imaging Library (PIL), lxml, numpy, and several others.

Best of all, upgrading won't require lots of code changes. “It was pretty straightforward,” says Underhill. “We had to be careful, but we ended up needing to change less than 0.4% of the code”.

If you're ready to make the switch, check out our migration guide, find out more about the other great features of the Python 2.7 runtime and get in-depth tips from the App Engine Python team by watching their talk on Migrating to Python 2.7 at Google I/O 2012.

- Posted by Andrew Jessup, Product Manager, Google App Engine