cloud-test

Google Cloud Platform Blog

$50 Credit for new billing signups and budget changes

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

At Google I/O this year, we announced that App Engine will be going out of preview before the end of the year. One aspect of leaving preview is our new pricing model. As promised we have started providing the ability for any application Admin to compare their existing cost to their new costs in the Admin Console (under “Billing History”). Now that you have an idea of what changes may impact your app, we’ve also written an article to help you optimize your application. We know many of you would rather code than think about your budget and billing settings, so to help with the transition we are extending a one-time courtesy credit of $50 to all free Apps that sign up for billing and all paid Apps that modify their budgets between now and October 31, 2011. Once you have signed up or made changes to your billing settings, a $50 credit will appear in the “Billing History” area of the Admin Console for your application. For more information on how to enable billing or change your settings, please see Billing and Budgeting Resources.

This is a big step for the App Engine Team; thank you for your continued support and feedback, and we hope you find these tools useful as we get closer to our goal of leaving preview!

Posted by the App Engine Team

Google

App Engine 1.5.3 SDK Released

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Blobstore API - We’ve removed the limits on the size of blob uploads. You can now upload files of any size, allowing your app to serve images, video, or anything your internet connection can handle.

Index retrieval - We’ve added the ability for you to programmatically retrieve the list of indexes you’ve currently defined in the datastore, as well as their statuses.

Datastore Admin - You can now enable the Datastore Admin function from the Admin Console. This will allow Java users to make use of this functionality, like deleting all entities of a certain kind, without having to upload a Python version of their application. And for Python developers, you no longer need to enable this in your app.yaml file.

HRD Migration Trusted Testers - We are seeking early adopters to try out an improved HRD migration tool that requires a read-only period relative to your datastore write rate (as opposed to your datastore size, which is how the current version behaves). Please see the release notes for more information.

Memcache API - We now support the CAS (compare-and-swap) operation in our Python Memcache API (Java already had it). This can be used to update a value in Memcache only if no other requests have updated it between when the value was retrieved and when you go to update it.

Download app - Using the AppCfg download_app command, you can download any files that were uploaded from your war directory when you last updated the app version.

PythonJavaGoogle GroupPosted by The App Engine Team

Google

Google App Engine receives SAS70 and SSAE-16 certification

Friday, August 5, 2011

As we get ready for App Engine to leave preview release later this year, we want to make clear that in addition to improving our reliability, adding new features, and introducing developer support, we are also committed to demonstrating we have sufficient controls in place to safeguard the data you store with us.Today we are happy to announce that over the past few weeks Google App Engine successfully completed the audit process for the SAS70 Type II, SSAE 16 Type II, and ISAE 3402 Type II standards.You can read more about the Google’s certifications and commitment to protect user data on the Enterprise blog.Posted by The App Engine Team

Google

App Engine 1.5.2 SDK Released

Thursday, July 21, 2011

As the summer heat descends on the Northern Hemisphere we thought we’d release our newest App Engine version with some changes that are sure to keep you playing around in the cool, air-conditioned indoors (hey, you don’t want your computer to overheat, right?).Production Changes

Adjustable Scheduler Parameters - As we previously discussed, we are introducing two scheduler knobs (okay, they actually look like sliders) that will allow you to control some of the parameters that influence how many Instances run your application. Today you will be able to set the minimum pending latency and maximum number of idle instances for your application.

Datastore Changes

Advanced Query Planning - We are removing the need for exploding indexes and reducing the custom index requirements for many queries. The SDK will suggest better indexes in several cases and an upcoming article will describe what further optimizations are possible.

Namespaced Datastore Stats - Now, in addition to getting overall datastore stats, we are providing a new option to query datastore stats per namespace.

Task Queue Changes

New Task Queue details page - We’ve revamped the Task Queue details page in the Administration Console to provide more information about the tasks being run. You can now see the headers included in the enqueued task, the payload, and information from previous task runs.

1MB Pull Task Size - It’s our belief that there is only one way for size limits to go - and that’s up! So with this release we’ve increased the size for pull tasks to 1MB.

Pull queue lease modification - We’ve introduced a new method for Pull Queues that allows you to extend the lease on existing tasks if the initial lease on the task was insufficient.

Lastly, we have some exciting news related to the experimental Go runtime. While it still remains experimental, starting with 1.5.2, all HRD apps will have access to the Go runtime in production.As always, there are also some small features and bug fixes, the full list of which can be found in our release notes (Python, Java). We look forward to your feedback and questions in our forum.Posted by The App Engine Team

Google

Postmortem: Java App Engine outage, July 14, 2011

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Summary

Last week, we posted about a limited outage on July 14, 2011. Now that our internal postmortem is complete, we thought you would also like to get more detail about what went wrong and what we are going to do to ensure this doesn't happen again.

Root Cause and Analysis

The main lesson learned is to improve our live traffic testing as a relatively minor bug triggered a corner case for some of our customers. The bug was in a new release of the infrastructure in the App Engine Java execution environment. During development, testing, and qualification, this bug was essentially hidden from view because it only manifested itself under specific load patterns. During the outage, requests to affected applications would fail with errors when traffic was routed to affected instances. Application logs would have shown affected instances experienced high latency, error rates, or were not reachable from the Internet. This could have been caught by letting the live traffic testing run longer.

In order for live traffic testing to work properly, we need to improve our monitoring as well. In this case, having more points from which to do black box monitoring would have helped immensely. We are currently working on much broader monitoring for App Engine and will be integrating more extensive black box testing in upcoming quarters.

Once again, we’d like to point out that we could have done a much better job of communicating issues to all of you. While we strive to strike a balance between letting you know about major issues and not bothering you about the day-to-day operations; we clearly should have communicated this incident to you sooner. Rest assured you’ll be better informed of issues in the future.

Timeline

July 14, 2011 - 11:30 AM US/Pacific - The new Java execution environment is released to production.

July 14, 2011 - 5:00-6:00 PM US/Pacific - The previously scheduled Master/Slave read-only maintenance period occurred.

July 14, 2011 - 8:00-9:30 PM US/Pacific - Monitoring shows error rates and latency for Java applications using the Master/Slave datastore are slowly increasing across the entire system. Investigation reveals that the new Java execution environment is malfunctioning.

July 14, 2011 - 9:30 PM US/Pacific - Rollback of the Java execution environment to the previous version begins. Latency and error rates begin to fall.

July 14, 2011 - 11:30 PM US/Pacific - Rollback of the Java execution environment to the previous version completes. Java Master/Slave applications are functioning normally.

Remediation

Faster notification on our status site and downtime-notify mailing list

More live traffic stress tests for new releases

Better black box monitoring to detect small impacts more quickly

[Edit] Clarification: no HR datastore apps were affected. Overall, the outage resulted in a 1.9% error rate, affecting approximately 0.005% of all App Engine traffic at peak.

Posted by Wesley Chun, Google App Engine Team

Google

Java App Engine outage, July 14, 2011

Friday, July 15, 2011

On July 14, 2011, beginning at 7 PM US/Pacific time (PDT/GMT-7), a subset of Java App Engine applications were affected by a service outage, which gradually increased in magnitude over time. At 9:30 PM US/Pacific, repair work commenced which began to reduce the effect of the outage; by 11:30 PM US/Pacific, the repair work had completed, restoring normal service to all Java App Engine applications.

During this period, affected applications would have experienced high latency and error rates. This outage occurred shortly after a scheduled maintenance period; however, the outage was not related to the maintenance work.

Overall reliability, quick return to service, and fast, accurate communication to our customers are some of the core goals of Google App Engine's service offering. While we restored service relatively quickly, it's clear to us that we fell short in prompt communication of status updates. We apologize for this, and we'll look at our procedures to improve our performance in this area.

In the meantime, we have a preliminary understanding of the outage, and we are continuing our investigation to insure that we have fully repaired the root cause. We will publish a detailed postmortem once we have concluded our research. Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

[Edit] Clarification: no HR datastore apps were affected. Overall, the outage resulted in a 1.9% error rate, affecting approximately 0.005% of all App Engine traffic at peak.

Posted by Wesley Chun, Google App Engine team

Google

Wanted: App Engineers

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

You may have heard the news that 2011 is Google’s biggest hiring year yet. And the App Engine team is looking for a few great Software Engineers to join us in San Francisco to code, collaborate on innovative ideas for platform computing, and get burritos with us every Friday.

The App Engine team in San Francisco.

We think we have some of the best and most enthusiastic developers out there-- so we thought we’d ask you to come work with us. The App Engine team needs talented developers to help build the platform by developing the features on our road map and issue tracker, as well as that amazing feature idea you have that will revolutionize App Engine for our users.If you are a backend engineer who is experienced with C++ or Java, lives and breathes distributed systems, and is obsessed with scalability, please visit our jobs website to submit your resume along with a cover letter describing your experience with App Engine. We’ll be in touch if we think your experience matches our open positions.Thanks for continuing to help make App Engine a great platform!Posted by The App Engine Team