Google Cloud Platform Blog: App Engine 1.7.6 Released

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Cloud Platform

App Engine 1.7.6 Released

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The App Engine team is continuing to make monthly improvements to our platform. We have a number of new features and fixes for this month’s release.

New App Engine billing system for paid applications

We’re making it easier to pay for App Engine each billing cycle by transitioning to a new billing system. This change will happen automatically for billing-enabled applications, with no action required on your part. With the new system you can now:

take advantage of monthly billing cycles
make a payment at any time during the month
specify direct debit as a form of payment
assign a primary and backup credit card

We’ll start moving applications to this new billing system over the next few weeks. You don’t need to make any changes and the migration itself will be transparent.

Other notable features

Full Text Search API stats are now available in the admin console. You can start viewing these stats in advance of being able to pay for additional search resources in an upcoming release.
We’ve added asynchronous methods, which is now in Preview, to the Task Queue API. This feature improves utilization by allowing your app to add, lease and delete multiple tasks in parallel.
A major overhaul to the Python dev_appserver, the software used to simulate App Engine while in development. The new dev_appserver is multi-threaded, meaning development is faster, and provides a more accurate simulation of the production environment.
Admin console dashboard charts and current load/errors reports are moving to a new, more reliable backend over the next few weeks.
Improved support for Python libraries, with Django 1.4.2 and webob 1.2.3 now Generally Available.

The complete list of features and bug fixes for 1.7.6 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.