Increase performance while reducing costs with the new App Engine scheduler

One of the main benefits of Google App Engine is automatic scaling of your applications. Behind the scenes, App Engine continually monitors your instance capacity and traffic to ensure the appropriate number of instances are running. Today, we are rolling out the next generation scheduler for App Engine standard environment. Our tests show that it delivers better scaling performance and more efficient resource consumption—and lower costs for you.

The new App Engine scheduler delivers the following improvements compared to the previous App Engine scheduler:

• an average of 5% reduction in median and tail request latencies
• an average of 30% reduction of the number of requests seeing a "cold start"
• an average of 7% cost reduction

In addition, if you need more control over how App Engine runs your applications, the new scheduler introduces some new autoscaling parameters. For example:

• Max Instances allows you to cap the total number of instances, and
• Target CPU Utilization represents the CPU utilization ratio threshold used to determine if the number of instances should be scaled up or down. Tweak this parameter to optimize between performance and costs.

For a complete list of the parameters you can use to configure your App Engine app, visit the app.yaml reference documentation.

The new scheduler for App Engine standard environment is generally available and has been rolled out to all regions and all applications. We are very excited about the improvements it brings.

You can read more about the new feature in the App Engine documentation. And if you have concerns or are encountering issues, reach out to us via GCP Support, by reporting a public issue, posting in the App Engine forum, or messaging us on the App Engine slack channel. We look forward to your feedback!