Google Cloud Platform Blog: App Engine 1.6.0 Out of Preview Release

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App Engine 1.6.0 Out of Preview Release

Monday, November 7, 2011

Three and a half years after App Engine’s first Campfire One, App Engine has graduated from Preview and is now a fully supported Google product. We started out with the simple philosophy that App Engine should be ‘easy to use, easy to scale, and free to get started.’ And with 100 billion+ monthly hits, 300,000+ active apps, and 100,000+ developers using our product every month it’s clear that this philosophy resonates. Thanks to your support, Google is making a long term investment in App Engine! When we announced our plans to leave preview earlier this year, we made a commitment to improving the service by adding support for Python 2.7, Premier Accounts and Backends as well as several changes launching today:

Pricing: The new pricing structure announced in May (and updated based on feedback from the community) will be reflected in your bill starting on Nov 7th as previously announced.

Terms of Service: We have a new business-friendly terms of service and acceptable use policy.

Service Level Agreement: All paid applications on the High Replication Datastore are covered by our 99.95% SLA.

We are also holding a series of App Engine Office hours via Google+ this week for any users who have questions about how these changes impact their applications. The list of times can be found on the Google Developers events page, with links to join the hangout while the office hours are scheduled. Also, please don’t hesitate to contact us at appengine_updated_pricing@google.com with any questions or concerns. In addition to leaving Preview, we have several additional changes to announce today.
Production Changes For billing enabled apps, we are offering two more scheduler controls and some additional changes:

Min Idle Instances: You can now adjust the minimum number of Idle Instances for your application, from 1 to 100. Users who had previously signed up for “Always On” can now set the number of idle instances for their applications using this setting.

Max Pending Latency: For applications that care about user facing latency, this slider allows you to set a limit to the amount of time a request spends in the pending queue before starting up a new instance.

Blobstore API: You can now use the Blobstore API without signing up for billing.

Datastore Changes

High Replication Datastore Migration Tool: We are releasing an experimental tool that allows you to easily migrate your data from Master/Slave to High Replication Datastore, and seamlessly switch your application’s serving to the new HRD application.

Query Planning Improvements: We’ve published an article that details recent improvements to our query planner that eliminate the need for exploding indexes.

Python

MapReduce: We are releasing the full MapReduce framework in experimental for Python. The framework includes the Map, Shuffle, and Reduce phases.

Python 2.7 in the SDK: The SDK now supports the Python 2.7 runtime, so you can test out your changes before uploading them to production.

Java™

Memcache API Improvements: The Memcache API for Java now supports asynchronous calls. Additionally, putIfUntouched() and getIdentifiable() now support batch operations.

Capability Testing: We’ve added the ability to simulate the capability state of local API implementations to test your application’s behavior if a service is unavailable.

Datastore Callbacks: You can now specify actions to perform before or after a put() or delete() call.

The full list of changes with this release can be found in the release notes (Python, Java). We’d love to hear your feedback about this release in the groups. And we’d like to thank you all for investing in our platform for the last three years. We’re excited for this milestone in App Engine history, and we look forward to what the future will bring.

Posted by The App Engine Team

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