Re: [google-appengine] Re: One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google
Thank you Daniel for your update! It's great to hear an official statement from Google about App Engine's health and future. I've certainly been enjoying increased reliability and reduced instance warmup time over the past couple of years, and that's a reflection of the hard work that's been going on behind the scenes. At the same time, I would have liked to see some more development on the Datastore while other projects such as BigQuery appear to be isolated from it. I believe that GAE's power is in it simplicity so my hope is that you guys will carry on with this philosophy of a simpler to use, easier to maintain solution in App Engine (I bet that's not an easy to achieve goal by any means, considering all the other services such as Gcloud).or The other main aspect that's attracted me to GAE, the platform, is that it comes with batteries included, all you need to get a web app up and running is there. By spinning off services such as the Datastore or adding foreign ones such as Cloudstore and Big Query, one feels that the focus gets lost. But hey, I'm looking forward to experimenting with managed VMs, have been lurking on the Beta mailing list quite regularly. Regards, Emanuele On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 16:49:12 UTC+13, Daniel Sturman wrote: 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 javascript: (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
Re: [google-appengine] Re: One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google
Hi Dan, thanks for taking the time. We have not heard from anybody from Google in this forum for many months so your reassuring communication is very welcome. I list below some of the reasons that might explain why some of us who have been following GAE for a long time have been skeptical about Google’s commitment and jump to conclusion when articles like this appears in the press. 1. There are still 3,000 issues open in the tracker. Although many of them are irrelevant enhancements others are critical. For instance, ---we never expected that 5 years later would be still unable to send 8-bit e-mail through the platform (issue 2383) or —in the critical area of security we would have to deal with a Users API stuck in the 2009 reality and crashes in certain important use cases (issues 9045 and 8916) or --- that it would still be so difficult to create an SSL app (issue 8528). 2. Now what makes this more frustrating is that bugs have been aging for way too long. For instance, issue 2383 was filed in 2009, it was accepted in 2012 and at the end of 2014 it is still open. 3. Google used to communicate a roadmap here. This was great for our planning. At some point the roadmap disappeared, again without communication. Furthermore, until a few months ago new releases (and pre-releases) were announced in this forum. Then suddenly the announcements and every Googler disappeared without warning. StackOverflow is a great QA forum but is not a discussion or announcement forum. 4. Finally, last but not least the enthusiasm on Google’s part does not come across. I have been following GAE and developing since almost day one. The early days the developers were out here and in the irc chatrooms all the time. Input from customers was actively sought. Now we do not see anybody from your engineering/PM team here in the trenches. Knowing the alternatives, I remain very enthusiastic about PaaS in general and GAE in particular. I acknowledge that the GAE stability is very good, Google’s innovations in the hybrid IaaS/PaaS cloud is significant and that recently I have seen more activity in the issues tracker. For instance, I was impressed how proactive you were when I filed 11396 or regression 10503. I remain optimistic that the GAE stability will stay where it is but also that the Google investment reflected in faster feature velocity will increase, and the open communication will return. Best, PK http://www.gae123.com On November 10, 2014 at 8:09:09 PM, Daniel Sturman (stur...@google.com) wrote: 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, 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, 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
Re: [google-appengine] Re: One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google
Completely agree on the issue tracker. There are many relatively low hanging fruit bugs which have been neglected for years. I guess partly because Google went after the most starred bug: PHP. If that was a worthy investment I do not know. I guess it wasn't. I hope the second-most starred bug (Perl) isn't next on the TODO list :D -- 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.
[google-appengine] Re: I can't install docer images with gcloud preview app setup-managed-vms
Hi, There is an ongoing issue w/ the SDK support for boot2docker 1.3.1, as a temporary workaround you can downgrade the boot2docker 1.3.0 as advised by the documentation. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/managed-vms/ boot2docker download --iso-url=https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/releases/download/v1.3.0/boot2docker.iso. On Thursday, November 6, 2014 7:33:22 AM UTC-8, Илья Дьячков wrote: Pulling base images for runtimes [python27] from Google Cloud Storage Pulling image: google/appengine-python27 *Error pulling image google/appengine-python27* Pulling image: google/appengine-log-processor *Error pulling image google/appengine-log-processor* Pulling image: google/appengine-log-server *Error pulling image google/appengine-log-server* Base images for runtimes [python27] are pulled -- 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.
Re: [google-appengine] Re: One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google
+1 nice to hear from Dan... very encouraging indeed!!! +1 to PKs comments as well... Hopefully Dan's improvement list includes better Datastore admin... especially the ability to edit repeated fields! I have to write custom admin code for every repeated field I may need to edit. The strategic use of repeated fields is key to success with the GAE datastore so it's not like they are some obscure back seat feature. I really like Dan's comments about SSDs... the write time on the datastore is terrible compared to AWS Dynamo (all SSD with single digit ms writes) BUT the datastore has better transaction support and is arguably a better general purpose datastore (includes zigzag merge-join queries etc). Managed VMs via Docker containers gets a big thumbs up from me as a GAE gap filler! Looks very promising! - Doug On Tuesday, November 11, 2014 12:25:24 PM UTC-5, PK wrote: Hi Dan, thanks for taking the time. We have not heard from anybody from Google in this forum for many months so your reassuring communication is very welcome. I list below some of the reasons that might explain why some of us who have been following GAE for a long time have been skeptical about Google’s commitment and jump to conclusion when articles like this appears in the press. 1. There are still 3,000 issues open in the tracker https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list?can=2q=colspec=ID+Type+Component+Status+Stars+Summary+Language+Priority+Owner+Logcells=tiles. Although many of them are irrelevant enhancements others are critical. For instance, ---we never expected that 5 years later would be still unable to send 8-bit e-mail through the platform (issue 2383 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=2383) or —in the critical area of security we would have to deal with a Users API stuck in the 2009 reality and crashes in certain important use cases (issues 9045 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=9045 and 8916 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8916) or --- that it would still be so difficult to create an SSL app (issue 8528 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8528). 2. Now what makes this more frustrating is that bugs have been aging for way too long. For instance, issue 2383 was filed in 2009, it was accepted in 2012 and at the end of 2014 it is still open. 3. Google used to communicate a roadmap here http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/features.html#Roadmap_Features. This was great for our planning. At some point the roadmap disappeared, again without communication. Furthermore, until a few months ago new releases (and pre-releases) were announced in this forum. Then suddenly the announcements and every Googler disappeared without warning. StackOverflow is a great QA forum but is not a discussion or announcement forum. 4. Finally, last but not least the enthusiasm on Google’s part does not come across. I have been following GAE and developing since almost day one. The early days the developers were out here and in the irc chatrooms all the time. Input from customers was actively sought. Now we do not see anybody from your engineering/PM team here in the trenches. Knowing the alternatives, I remain very enthusiastic about PaaS in general and GAE in particular. I acknowledge that the GAE stability is very good, Google’s innovations in the hybrid IaaS/PaaS cloud is significant and that recently I have seen more activity in the issues tracker. For instance, I was impressed how proactive you were when I filed 11396 or regression 10503. I remain optimistic that the GAE stability will stay where it is but also that the Google investment reflected in *faster feature velocity* will increase, and the *open communication* will return. Best, PK http://www.gae123.com On November 10, 2014 at 8:09:09 PM, Daniel Sturman (stu...@google.com javascript:) wrote: 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
Re: [google-appengine] Re: One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google
What have you got against PHP bro? ;) On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 06:18:06 UTC+11, pdknsk wrote: Completely agree on the issue tracker. There are many relatively low hanging fruit bugs which have been neglected for years. I guess partly because Google went after the most starred bug: PHP. If that was a worthy investment I do not know. I guess it wasn't. I hope the second-most starred bug (Perl) isn't next on the TODO list :D -- 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.
Re: [google-appengine] Re: One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google
+1 thx for the inspiring post. I'm excited about Managed VMs, in our case for hosting a SOLR/Lucene instance. adam (Google TLM, Gadgets 2004-2009) -- 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.
