Google Cloud Platform Blog: November 2013

Compute Engine Load Balancing hits 1 million requests per second!

Monday, November 25, 2013

C10k problemEurovision Song Contest

Compute Engine Load Balancinghow to provision Compute Engine VMs

curl_loaderApache v2.2.22Gist

Dedicated memcache is now generally available in App Engine 1.8.8

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

dedicated memcache is now generally availableDedicated memcacheKhan Academyrelease notesStack OverflowGoogle Group

Development tips for Google Cloud Endpoints for Android

Monday, November 18, 2013

Google Cloud Endpointsnew article about Google Cloud Endpoints for AndroidJavaPython

Offline Disk Import and the OmNomNom Machine

Thursday, November 14, 2013

expanding our offline disk import servicedata centersStreet ViewOmNomNom

Limited Preview of International Offline Disk Importgsutil

International Offline Disk Import now available with new disk-upload centers in Japan, India and Switzerland

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Google Cloud Platformstandard Cloud Storage storage feesannouncedform

Google App Engine integration features in IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Today’s guest post comes from Maarten Balliauw, Technical Evangelist at JetBrains, the vendor of smart developer tools such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, PhpStorm, Android Studio and many more.Google App Engine

Creating a new project in PyCharm

Code completion in IntelliJ IDEA knows about App Engine APIs

Google App Engine specific code inspections in Pycharm

http://localhost:8080Run

Running Google App Engine Java app locally

Shift+F9Debug

Debugging Google App Engine application in IntelliJ IDEA

Tools > Google App Engine > Upload App Engine app menu

App deployment from an IDE

JavaPythonIntelliJ IDEAPyCharm

Connecting mobile developers to the cloud with Google Cloud Endpoints

Monday, November 11, 2013

Google Cloud EndpointsMobile Backend StarterGoogle Cloud Endpoints is now Generally AvailableGoogle Cloud Endpoints

Cloud Endpoints simplifies multi-client access to a shared Google App Engine backend

built their product using App Engine and Cloud Endpoints“Cloud Endpoints certainly has enabled us to offer an API that is on par with the best APIs out there. It has enabled us to build an API that feels and behaves like APIs from YouTube, Google Maps and other Google services...We would never have been able to offer something comparable in the same amount of time. Building all of that without Google Cloud Endpoints would have been unthinkableServer Side Annotation LanguageJavaPythonpackage guestbook; import javax.inject.Named; import com.google.api.server.spi.config.Api; @Api public class GreetingsEndpoint { public Greeting getGreeting(@Named("id") Integer id) { return createGreeting(id); } public Greeting[] listGreetings() { Greeting[] greetings = new Greeting[] { createGreeting(1), createGreeting(2) }; return greetings; } private Greeting createGreeting(Integer id) { Greeting greeting = new Greeting(); greeting.setMessage("Hello " + id); return greeting; } } Client Side Development

Automatic strongly-typed client library generation in Android Studio to simplify API consumption

Mobile Backend Starter UpdateMobile Backend StarterGoogle Cloud Messaging

Handling Large Media Files: Many mobile applications let users view and upload videos and high resolution images. But storing and serving this content can be cumbersome. Google Cloud Storage offers high durability and availability at low cost. MBS now allows you to easily manage user-isolated and secure access to data in Cloud Storage directly from your iOS or Android application, with no server coding required.

Imagine that you are building an expense reporting mobile app and you want to allow your users to upload pictures of their receipts. This is very straightforward. Your Android or iOS app can obtain a secure upload URL that only your application can use and then use standard client libraries to stream bytes to Google Cloud Storage. In this snippet of code for Android notice that in this case the uploaded file will be available only to the user who uploaded it.

// get a secure URL for uploading a private file
URL url = blobEndpoint.getUploadUrl("receipts",  
                             getReceiptFileName(),"PRIVATE")
                       .execute().getShortLivedUrl());

Downloading images and other files is also easy. You start with obtaining a secure download URL and then you can use standard client libraries to download bytes from Google Cloud Storage. MBS will authenticate the caller and check if it is allowed to download the file.

// get a secure URL for downloading a file
URL url = blobEndpoint.getDownloadUrl("receipts", 
                             getReceiptFileName())
                       .execute().getShortLivedUrl());

Updated Mobile Clients: We have updated the template mobile clients as well. Both Android and iOS display an updated user interface and incorporate best practices. The Android client sports the newest version of Google Cloud Messaging.

Cloud EndpointsMobile Backend Starter

Rovio, Freshplanet, Pocket Gems and others talk about building games on Google Cloud Platform

Friday, November 8, 2013

Build amazing real time games on Google Cloud Platform with Node.js and Websocket

Thursday, November 7, 2013

solutions articleWorld Wide Maze

World Wide Maze: Real-time 3D maze game playable with Chrome and mobile devices

The request from the controller received by the server

The request routed to the screen from the server

The maze rendered on the screen, based on the request

WebSocketReal-time Gaming with Node.js + WebSocket on Google Cloud Platform

Just Develop IT Migrates Petabytes of Data to Google Cloud Storage

Thursday, November 7, 2013

We interviewed Brooke Bryan, CTO of Just Develop It Ltd (JDI), one of the leaders in device data backup with popular applications including My PC Backup. In early 2013, the company migrated 5 petabytes of data from Amazon S3 to Google Cloud Storage. Since then, JDI’s business has expanded their use to over 10 petabytes at a rate of 800 terabytes a month.What does Just Develop IT do?Skylark Golf & Country ClubJust CloudWhy did JDI want to migrate to the cloud? Why did you switch from Amazon S3 to Google Cloud Storage?Google Cloud StorageWhat challenges did the migration present?

We needed high network bandwidth and parallel data transfer mechanisms to ensure that the migration could be completed as soon as possible.

Since JDI has multiple storage/backup products, the process had to be invisible to our users, as a disruption of service would directly affect the confidence in our products.

We had to keep costs low during the process, which raised two issues: We paid twice the fees to store objects in both Amazon and Google systems in order to ensure that services would not be disrupted; and if an object was copied multiple times, we incurred unnecessary AWS egress network costs.

How did Google meet these challenges? Google Compute EngineHow has your experience with Google been since the implementation?

App Engine 1.8.7 and a platform that is great for game developers

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

casual mobileweb gamesthis paperGoogle+Twitterdownload the SDKrelease notes

Google App Engine helps MAG Interactive handle explosive growth of word game, Ruzzle

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Today we hear from Daniel Hasselberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of mobile game development company, MAG Interactive, based in Stockholm, Sweden. MAG Interactive produces some of the most popular games in the world, including Ruzzle, which has more than 45 million players in 142 different countries.Google App EngineGoogle BigQuery

Applibot builds social games on Google Cloud Platform

Monday, November 4, 2013

Google Cloud Platform’sApplibot

How to build scalable mobile games on Google Cloud Platform

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Google Cloud Platformtechnical paperreference architecture

Java game backendAndroid clientiOS client

Java game backendAndroid clientsuccessful games

Kaplan builds online education platform KAPx with Google App Engine

Friday, November 1, 2013

Today's guest post is from Charlie Ward, VP of Platform Development at Kaplan Inc., a global educational services company that operates in 170 countries and serves one million students annually. Charlie describes why Kaplan chose Google App Engine as the foundation for a scalable, flexible, and robust education platform that allows anyone to easily deliver learning content in both live and recorded formats.The Drivers for ChangeFirst impressions with Google App Engine

Adding on Google Hangouts & Google AppsKAPxKaplan UniversityMount Washington CollegeTips for getting started with Google App Engine

There are many excellent examples of App Engine solutions in the GoogleCloudPlatform repository on GitHub to get you started.

Use webapp2 and the jinja2 template engine for serving up content unless you need something heavier. This lightweight but flexible combination is simple to use and provides an easy way to deliver MVC style HTML templates as well as raw data for RESTful APIs.

Use the NDB datastore libraries to get memcache for free. NDB was experimental when we first launched our platform, so we went with GAE’s DB datastore having to write our own handlers for front loading DB queries with memcache. With NDB, this is provided for you, dramatically improving performance and shortening development time.

Plan ahead if you are going to need to aggregate data (join, counts, etc). Operations that you would typically rely on in a relational database (joins, groupings and aggregate functions) are not as straightforward when working with the NoSQL DB or NDB datastore. You’ll want to plan out your models with the appropriate keys / properties to support aggregation in code foregoing joins and grouping when possible.

When relying heavily on the built in datastore and memcache implementations, you’ll want to understand their upper limits and design around them. There are excellent articles available on eventual consistency, sharding data, reducing datastore contention, async task queues, and MapReduce in the developers.google.com/appengine site that can provide you with techniques to work within the boundries of service quotas and the constraints of a highly scalable environment.

Invest time upfront to set up automated extracts of your log data to Google BigQuery on a regular basis. This will pay huge dividends the first time you need to track down a bug in production, as the dashboard tools out of the box are cumbersome to work with at scale.

Use the --datastore_consistency_policy=random option on dev_appserver.py when developing locally to identify potential problems with delayed datastore writes before deploying.

-Contributed by Charlie Ward, VP of Platform Development, Kaplan