cloud-test: April 2013

App Engine 1.7.7 Released

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

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

Python 2.5, thanks for the good times

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Python 2.5 has a special place in the heart of any Google App Engine developer, as it was the first runtime we launched way back in 2008. Since then, both Python and App Engine have advanced a great deal.

A year ago we announced our support for Python 2.7, which brings syntactic and semantic improvements to the language and includes powerful features like threading and a large selection of third-party libraries.

Not only does Python 2.7 make developers’ lives easier, the runtime is extremely cost-effective. Our customers have taken advantage of features like concurrent requests to reduce their front-end instance costs by more than 70% while handling the same amount of traffic.

Not surprisingly, the Python 2.7 runtime has proven to be extremely popular. Just over a year after launch, more than 78% of active Python applications on App Engine are using the new runtime, and more are being added every minute.

As both Python and App Engine evolve, we must occasionally make hard choices about which legacy runtimes we should continue to support. Today we are announcing the deprecation of the Python 2.5 runtime. The deprecation period will follow the guidelines set in our terms of service.

What does this mean?

We will continue to run Python 2.5 applications throughout the deprecation period. For most customers, upgrading to Python 2.7 is trivial as most elements of Python 2.5 are forwards-compatible with Python 2.7. We’ve prepared a handy migration guide that covers the steps to migrate in detail.

If your application is still using the already deprecated Master/Slave Datastore, then you should first plan the migration to our more reliable High Replication Datastore, as the Master/Slave Datastore is not accessible from Python 2.7.

Future versions of the App Engine Python Development SDK will display warnings to developers deploying updates to a deprecated runtime.

Starting from January 2014, we will no longer allow new applications to be created using the Python 2.5 runtime.

We encourage all developers using Python 2.5 to consider migrating as soon as possible. We’re confident that the vast majority of our customers will find the upgrade straightforward and the benefits substantial.

If you’re considering migrating, here are some useful resources:

Our summary of the new features we’ve introduced in Python 2.7 including additional standard libraries and third-party libraries that are supported.

A handy migration guide, explaining the steps to move a Python 2.5 app to Python 2.7

App Engine engineers give an in-depth discussion during Google I/O on the many improvements in Python 2.7, and how to quickly take advantage of them.

If you have any questions about this deprecation, we encourage you to contact us at google-appengine-python25-deprecation@googlegroups.com.

-Posted by Andrew Jessup, Product Manager

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

Thursday, April 4, 2013

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

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

-Posted by Robert Do, Product Marketing Manager

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?

Sign up for App Engine.

Get your Twilio account and 2,000 free text message or voice minutes.

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

Google Cloud Platform Blog

App Engine 1.7.7 Released

Python 2.5, thanks for the good times

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

Integrate Voice and SMS with Twilio on Google Cloud Platform

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