WebProNews

Tag: App Engine

  • Google Cloud Platform Gets Price Drop, New Features

    Google announced on Tuesday at its Cloud Platform Live event that it is lowering prices on Cloud Platform, and launching cloud-based DevOps tooling, Managed Virtual Machines (VM) for App Engine, real-time Big Data analytics with BigQuery.

    On the pricing, Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle says, “The original promise of cloud computing was simple: virtualize hardware, pay only for what you use, with no upfront capital expenditures and lower prices than on-premise solutions. But pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law: over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30% annually but public cloud prices fell at just 8% per year. We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85%.”

    Compute Engine has been reduced by 32% across all sizes, regions and classes. App Engine gets a simplified pricing strtucture with significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances. Cloud Storage is priced at 2.6 per GB, which is roughly 68% less for most customers, according to the company. Finally, BigQuery on-demend prices have been reduced by 85%.

    They’ve also launched sustained-use discounts, which start automatically when you use a VM for over 25% of the month. When you use a VM for a whole month, Google knocks off another 30% over the new on-demand prices for a total reduction of 53
    53%.

    sustained discounts

    “We’re also introducing features that make development more productive,” says Hölzle. “Build, test, and release in the cloud, with minimal setup or changes to your workflow. Simply commit a change with git and we’ll run a clean build and all unit tests; Aggregated logs across all your instances, with filtering and search tools; Detailed stack traces for bugs, with one-click access to the exact version of the code that caused the issue. You can even make small code changes right in the browser. We’re working on even more features to ensure that our platform is the most productive place for developers. Stay tuned.”

    Managed VMs will let you run any binary inside a VM and turn it into part of your App Engine app, and App Engine will automatically manage them.

    On real-time big data, Hölzle says, “BigQuery lets you run interactive SQL queries against datasets of any size in seconds using a fully managed service, with no setup and no configuration. Starting today, with BigQuery Streaming, you can ingest 100,000 records per second per table with near-instant updates, so you can analyze massive data streams in real time. Yet, BigQuery is very affordable: on-demand queries now only cost $5 per TB and 5 GB/sec reserved query capacity starts at $20,000/month, 75% lower than other providers.”

    Compute Engine now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 in limited preview and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for everyone.

    Image via Google

  • Learn How To Make Web Apps With HTML5 And App Engine

    Learn How To Make Web Apps With HTML5 And App Engine

    Building a modern Web app can be a daunting task for someone not familiar with HTML5. That’s where Google comes in with its newest tutorial.

    The folks at Google have a new talk up today on how to best utilize HTML5 and Google App Engine Endpoints to create modern Web apps that can work in offline mode while supporting all the latest HTML5 technologies. Watch the video tutorial below, and follow along with the slides here.

  • Google Ups Its Cloud Platform Support Game

    Google announced the launch of a new set of support packages for services on the Google Cloud Platform today. These cover App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, etc.

    “While you can go to Stack Overflow or Google Groups, we realize some of you may need 24×7 coverage, phone support or direct access to a Technical Account Manager team,” says Brett McCully from Google’s Cloud Platform team.

    There are four tiers:

    • Bronze: All customers get access to online documentation, community forums, and billing support. (Free)
    • Silver: In addition to Bronze, you can email our support team for questions related to product functionality, best practices, and service errors. ($150/month)
    • Gold: In addition to Silver, you’ll receive 24×7 phone support and consultation on application development, best practices or architecture for your specific use case. (Starts at $400/month)
    • Platinum: The most comprehensive and personalized support. In addition to Gold, you’ll get direct access to a Technical Account Manager team. (Contact Sales for more information)

    Here’s another way to look at it:

    Cloud Platform

    More info here.

  • Google Releases App Engine 1.7.2

    Google Releases App Engine 1.7.2

    It’s been a few months since an update hit Google’s App Engine. The company has been working on the large scale version, Compute Engine, since its unveiling at Google I/O in June. That doesn’t mean they forgot about App Engine though. In fact, the fine folks at Google have spent the summer making it even better.

    Google announced that App Engine 1.7.2 is available to all users. They explain that the delay in release came from the team spending the entire summer killing bugs that had been submitted. In all, they were able to squash more than 130 bugs since the last major update in May.

    Bug fixes are nice, but new features are equally important to the advancement of a product. The latest version of App Engine doesn’t disappoint by allowing developers to upload more than 1GB of code and static files to the cloud. Storage under 1GB will remain free, but anything over will cost $0.13/GB per month.

    The update adds more code support to App Engine as well. Google says that PyCrypto 2.6 is now fully supported as a third party library in Python 2.7. Java users will be delighted to learn that Java Threads are also now fully supported.

    A final update gives users the ability to fetch Task Queue Statistics. Google says that this allows you to view statistics and information from your task queue from within an application. This should be especially useful to developers who have to keep a constant eye on the apps they’re running.

    Outside of updates, Google is also looking to start a new tester program. They’re looking for people to start testing outbound socket functionality in App Engine. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can sign up here.

  • Can Google’s Compute Engine Compete With Amazon?

    Google impressed today with the reveal of Compute Engine, a cloud infrastructure that’s like App Engine on steroids. The company impressed with a demonstration of the cloud infrastructure’s power to deliver thousands upon thousands of processor cores to data heavy apps and services. While Google was talking up its advantages to help research, there was another market they didn’t really address – cloud-based business.

    Amazon Web Services is the de facto standard when it comes to cloud-based Web hosting. Businesses from all over the world depend upon Amazon to host their content, Web sites and businesses without fail. Netflix is one of the more prominent users of Amazon’s servers as they use the online retail giant’s infrastructure to deliver streaming video to millions of subscribers.

    It’s that kind of business that Google is attempting to attract with Compute Engine. Sure, it’s proven itself to be great for research, but research grants can only go so far. Google will now have to sell its infrastructure to businesses and maybe even steal customers away from Amazon.

    The biggest factor in the newly christened cloud war between Amazon and Google is definitely price. During the I/O keynote, Urs Holzle said that they had been driving the price down of virtual computing over the years. They have apparently been successful in this endeavor since he exclaimed that Google is able to offer “50 percent more compute per dollar.”

    When looking at that price versus what they offer, it’s not as rosy for Google. ZDNet broke down the pricing structure and found that Google is somewhat lacking when it comes to pricing options compared to Amazon. At the moment, Google only offers four options and they’re all paid with the most expensive being eight virtual cores at $1.16 per hour. Amazon has more options, including Windows-based VMs, that go all the way up to eight cores as well for $2.40 per hour.

    So Google wins on price alone, but as ZDNet points out, they just can’t compete with Amazon’s head start at the moment. Amazon offers more services and used its headstart to sign a lot of deals with those within the Enterprise market. Is Google going to do well with their newest venture? No doubt, but they will have to do more than just cure cancer to start making a splash.

  • Google Cures Cancer With 600,000 Processor Cores [Google I/O]

    You may be familiar with Google’s App Engine, a service that allows developers to host their apps on the cloud and take advantage of Google’s processing power to service thousands of users. Well, App Engine just got bigger – way bigger.

    At the Google I/O keynote today, the company announced Google Compute Engine. It’s App Engine on a massive scale. It’s intended for large scale operations that require lots of processing power and Google figures that their cloud service can help power the next generation of data processing.

    They used the example of a new app that is being used to research the genome that is helping to find potential cancer cures. Under current computational standards, Google pointed out that the research on the Genome Explorer app would take about 10 minutes to find each one match. To show off Compute Engine, they showed the same app being powered by 10,000 processor cores being powered by Google. This allows a match to be made every second.

    Compute Engine shows off the potential of cloud computing for research. A match a second wasn’t good enough for Google though and they showed a ticker that revealed there were now over 700,000 cores in Compute Engine. From there, they allotted 600,000 cores to the same genome app. Using that many cores, the app was able to discover multiple matches on a constant basis.

    Compute Engine has the potential to shake up the game in cloud computing. It’s only been used for personal or limited business uses for now. With Compute Engine, we can use cloud computing to push research and other large scale projects beyond previous thresholds.

    Compute Engine has been released today in a limited preview for partners to take advantage of. Google also said that it has been competitively priced to be affordable for all.

    UPDATE:

    Google released a blog post detailing Compute Engine and provided a bit more information on the service. Here’s the capabilities that you can expect from Compute Engine:

    Compute. Launch Linux VMs on-demand. 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual core VMs are available with 3.75GB RAM per virtual core.

    Storage. Store data on local disk, on our new persistent block device, or on our Internet-scale object store, Google Cloud Storage.

    Network. Connect your VMs together using our high-performance network technology to form powerful compute clusters and manage connectivity to the Internet with configurable firewalls.

    Tooling. Configure and control your VMs via a scriptable command line tool or web UI. Or you can create your own dynamic management system using our API.

    You can sign up for a limited preview for Compute Engine at Google’s official site. If you have dreams of curing cancer or processing advanced mathematics, this may be the service for you.

  • Google App Engine Gets Full Text Search

    Google App Engine Gets Full Text Search

    Google claims that a feature that has been consistently requested for App Engine was the addition of full text search. Those requests have not gone unheeded as Google has announced the feature to now be available.

    Google and its newly christened Google App Engine Full Text Search Team announced the feature’s availability yesterday. The project was announced at Google I/O last year, but this week marks its first time being available to the public on an experimental basis.

    So what does the experimental Search API accomplish? According to the Google Developers page for the API, it “allows your application to perform Google-like searches over structured data. You can search across several different types of data (plain text, HTML, atom, numbers, and dates). Searches return a sorted list of matching text, and you can customize the sorting and presentation of results.”

    The awesome part is that Google has created a test sample to let you get acquainted with how the new search function works. I’ve played around with it for a bit and found it to be extremely fast and easy to use. It picks up every single instance of the word or phrase I typed in throughout the text.

    It’s important to reiterate that this feature is still in the experimental stage. It should be mostly stable, but there will be bugs and other problems throughout the early days. That’s why Google needs developers to help test out the new full text search feature so it can get a firm grasp on all the bugs that need fixing. There’s already 14 open issues with the feature so help Google find more bugs so the feature can move from experimental to fully stable.

    It’s also worth mentioning that the Search API only works with applications using the High Replication Datastore. If your App Engine application is still using the old Master/Slave Datastore, you’re going to have to upgrade to take advantage of the new API.

    To get more information on the Search API and what it brings to App Engine, check out the video from last year’s Google I/O. I’m sure Google will talk about it again at this year’s I/O conference as well.

  • App Engine 1.6.5 Released, Brings New Datastore Features

    Many businesses and developers rely on Google’s App Engine to deliver their content to the Web. It’s a good thing then that Google is not being lazy with constant updates being made to the platform. Yesterday marked the release of version 1.6.5 of the Google App Engine.

    The first update is being made to the Datastore. Google is introducing an experimental type of query called a projection query. The company says that this new type of query has the “same cost and performance characteristics as keys-only queries but return entity objects populated only with the requested properties.”

    On top of that, there are some other new features coming to Datastore as well. Here’s the full feature list:

    Each entity group now has a numeric version property that strictly increases on every entity group change. You can use this counter, for example, to easily and consistently cache the results of an ancestor query, such as the count of all entities in an entity group

    The Datastore Admin now allows you to restore individual Kinds from an existing backup, abort in-progress backups, and view more detailed backup and restore information.

    For Python users, the @db.transactional decorator now supports concurrent transactions. We’ve also expanded the options available for the db.run_in_transtion_options() function.

    There are some new features coming to the Images API as well. The first is that the Images API can now access image objects stored in Google Cloud Storage. The second has URLs generated by get_serving_url or getServingUrl can now be generated to serve over HTTPS.

    Google is also including additional Request Headers in the newest release. They’ve added Region, City and LatLng headers to each request “where this information can be inferred from the IP address.”

    A small note to Java developers, you now must include the threadsafe element in your appengine-web.xml file. If you don’t, it will cause an error in the dev appserver.

    Finally, Google is looking for Trusted Testers for Task Queue Statistics. The feature allows you to “fetch statistics and information about your task queue from within your application.” If that sounds like something you would want to test, you can apply to be a Trusted Tester here.

  • Google Updates Its Deprecation Policy

    Google Updates Its Deprecation Policy

    Software gets old. It’s an unfortunate truth that many developers have to live with. It’s even harder when you have to deal with software that may be deprecating and it’s hard to know when official support is going to dry up.

    Google is hoping to make all of this easier by changing up their software deprecation policies. These include the changing some APIs to a one-year deprecation policy while just retiring some APIs outright. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of it to see which APIs are being affected.

    First up is the change to a one-year deprecation policy. They are not deprecation the APIs themselves, just the policy. The four APIs that are affected by this new policy are the Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, Maps/Earth API and the YouTube API. The App Engine, Maps and YouTube API will wind down from their three-year API deprecation period in April 2014 and transition to the new policy. Cloud Storage is keeping its current one-year policy.

    For the above mentioned APIs, Google is writing a new policy that is clearer and more concise. Google says that the new policy “simply states that we will strive to provide one year notice before making breaking changes.”

    A metric ton of other APIs will be losing their deprecation policies. To be clear again, Google is not removing these APIs. To give developers time to get things up to snuff, the current deprecation policies for these APIs will not be removed until April 2015. The current list of APIs to lose their policies are as follows: Accounts API, AdSense Host API, Chart Tools API, Checkout API, Contacts API, Custom Search API, Documents API, Doubleclick for Publishers API, Feed API, Google Apps Admin APIs, Libraries API, Orkut API, Picasa Web Albums API, and Prediction API.

    In sadder news, Google will be retiring some of their older APIs. These include the Moderator API, Legacy Portable Contacts API, ClientLogin, AuthSub, OAuth 1.0, and Google Chart Tools. They are also retiring the non-current versions of Spreadsheets, Contacts, Documents List and Freebase APIs. Last but not least, the Finance and Feedburner Administrative APIs will finally be retired after being depreciated last year.

    While some developers may cry fowl at these changes, Google assures you that they’re only doing this to make it easier for people to stay on top of the current tools available to them. This should allow everybody to be a level playing field in terms of the newest technology.

    What do you think of Google’s new deprecation policies? What about their massive removal of several API policies? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google Announces App Engine Research Awards

    Google’s App Engine is used for a lot of different web applications. While it can be used for business applications, the more interesting uses come from the scientific and research fields. Google is now going to reward those who use app engine in the most interesting ways.

    Google announced today the creation of the Google+App+Engine+Blog%29″>App Engine Research Awards. These awards will go to support 15 projects that use App Engine to push scientific and academic research into new areas. The winners will each receive App Engine credits in the amount of $60,000 for one year to help continue their research. As an added bonus, Google Cloud storage will also be coming to these projects as part of the program.

    Some of the suggestions Google gives as projects they’re interested in are “social or economic experiments, developing academic aids, analysis of gene sequence data, or using App Engine MapReduce in ways we hadn’t even discovered.” They also say that if your research “has the potential to advance discovery, generates heavy data loads or is in need of an easy-to-use, easy-to-scale platform, we encourage you to submit your proposal.”

    Well, you heard them. If your research project could use some funding to continue the research on App Engine, you have until May 11 to submit your proposal. I’m sure Google would just love it if you could figure out how to power a megalomaniacal AI with a potato.

    DISCLAIMER: Google will not fund projects such as this:

    Google Announces App Engine Research Awards

  • Google Releases App Engine 1.6.4 Into The Wild

    Google’s App Engine is one of the best services the company provides to developers. The constant updates to the core framework of the engine definitely helps that good will to go a long way. Good news then that only after a month, a new version of App Engine is up and ready.

    The Google App Engine blog Google+App+Engine+Blog%29″>announced the release of App Engine 1.6.4 today. Unlike other incremental numbered updates, App Engine receives quite the hefty update this time with plenty of features that should make developers happy.

    The new update brings with it system wide changes. These changes include:

    Logs – Now that the new settings for log storage have been available for one month, logs over the limit you specify will be deleted.

    Datastore Index Stats – The Datastore Statistics page in the Admin Console now displays the storage used by your Datastore Indexes in addition to your Datastore Entities.

    Blobstore Migration – The Datastore Migration tool now includes an experimental option which allows you to migrate your Blobstore objects during the migration process from M/S to HRD. We strongly encourage all applications to migrate to HRD.

    Datastore Backup to Google Cloud Storage – In 1.6.3, we launched backup and restore to Blobstore, and in this release we’ve added the ability to backup your data to Google Cloud Storage.

    Memcache viewer – We’ve introduced the ability to view Memcache statistics and examine memcache entries by key.

    Serve objects from Google Cloud Storage – You can now serve blobs directly from Google Cloud Storage as well as Blobstore.

    Runtime and datastore framework saw less changes, but they are important nonetheless. These changes include:

    Threads – Both Java and Python now offer background threads when running on backends as an experimental feature. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to use threads for frontend requests in Java to match Python 2.7.

    NDB for Python – The NDB API has graduated from experimental and is now a fully supported feature. This next-generation datastore API improves data modeling and querying and has been built from the ground up to support an asynchronous computing model.

    JPA 2 and JDO 3 for Java – We have made significant improvements to App Engine’s DataNucleus plugin. This experimental release of version 2.0 of the plugin adds support for JPA 2, JDO 3, and contains over 40 bug fixes. Check out the full release notes here.

    If you want to know more about these updates and the bug fixes in the release, check out the release notes for both Java and Python.