Hey fellow App Engine users,
There is some great conversation in this thread. I’ll try to address some of the key points being discussed. Regarding the discussion group; our apologies for the delayed response. Most of our customer questions now come on Stack Overflow <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-app-engine>, so we’ve been monitoring it more actively than this forum. We’ll be watching this forum more closely too from now on. Regarding the larger topic of Google’s investment in App Engine: App Engine is a critical part of our cloud story, and will continue to be. We’re investing heavily in it. In the most recent months this investment has had two major prongs - stability improvements and new efforts to create a more flexible model within App Engine. First, stability improvements. App Engine has grown and so has the size and sophistication of the workloads that relied on it (thanks to developers like you). We realized it was time to take a step back and invest in driving down technical debt and improving overall stability as a foundation for the future. The team has been heads down improving stability and reliability. Some of the improvements include more comprehensive monitoring across all services, better application scheduling and load balancing, deployment of SSD to reduce latency variability for Datastore access, and many others large and small. Second, a more flexible PaaS. App Engine’s prescriptive environment for building web and mobile applications allows teams to iterate quickly on new ideas and scale up the ones that stick. The drawback, though, comes in terms of its constraints (e.g. limited JRE access, limited C/C++ Python modules, no inbound socket support). When we were building out our IaaS offering, Compute Engine, we realized that by unifying the compute stack (layering App Engine on Compute Engine), we could continue to give our customers the developer experience and efficiencies that App Engine brings with the flexibility and power that’s normally only associated with IaaS. Further, since it is a single stack, users can drop down into the IaaS layers when needed to make lower-level customizations (although we hope that most will never have to). We’ve surfaced all of this work as App Engine Managed VMs <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/>, which are now in Beta and open to everyone that wants a test drive. You’ll see that Managed VMs do not require you to manage the OS or web server configuration, and frontend serving has all the same great features as our existing runtimes. In other words, they marry the best of App Engine with a more flexible application environment. Finally, unified administration tools are an important part of a cohesive platform. This is the goal of the Developers Console. In some cases the cutover has been a straight “drop in” of existing functionality, in others we took the opportunity to make improvements. Not all is perfect, so thank you for the feedback! I’ve created bugs / feature requests for the items you’ve mentioned (infinite scroll issues, “save as” issues, better Task Queue admin functionality) and suggest that any other feedback be sent to google-developers-console-feedb...@google.com (this is a more narrowly focused list). Looking ahead, the reliability work is wrapping up (although, much like you, we’re always investing in this area) and you can expect new feature work to start ramping up (for example, we’ll have 64 bit JVM support landing soon). The beta launch of Managed VMs will progress towards General Availability and, in parallel, we’re actively looking at which additional generalized services need to be surfaced into the PaaS layer and how we can make the App Engine experience you all know and love even better. 2015 is going to be a very exciting year! -Dan Sturman VP, Engineering On Sunday, November 9, 2014 9:30:16 PM UTC-8, Vinny P wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Brandon Thomson <b...@brandonthomson.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> Fixing bugs in legacy code is not exciting work and a new generation of >> engineers at Google may be tempted to "improve" things that aren't broken >> instead of doing the hard work of maintaining the existing code. >> > > > +1. New is not necessarily better. To go on a minor tangent, I liked the > older Google Groups UI better than the current version. > > > On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Kaan Soral <kaan...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> pdknsk has a nice point, you must be on a high support level :) >> > > > And +1 as well. A paid support contract gives the App Engine unicorns > some extra pep in their step :-) > > > > ----------------- > -Vinny P > Technology & Media Consultant > Chicago, IL > > App Engine Code Samples: http://www.learntogoogleit.com > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
