App Engine Premier Accounts and a new release

By Greg D'Alesandre, App Engine team

Cross-posted from the Google App Engine Blog

2011 has seen some exciting releases for App Engine. As the days get shorter, the weather gets colder, and all that Halloween candy starts tempting everyone in the grocery store, we’ve been hard at work on our latest action-packed release.

Premier Accounts

When choosing a platform for your most critical business applications, we recognize that uptime guarantees, easy management and paid support are often just as important as product features. So today we’re launching Google App Engine premier accounts.  For $500 per month (not including the cost to provision internet services), you’ll receive:

• Premium support (see the 
Technical Support Services Guidelines for details).
• A 99.95% uptime Service Level Agreement (see the draft agreement; the final agreement will be in the signed offline agreement).
• The ability to create an unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain.
• No minimum monthly fees per app. Pay only for the resources you use.
• Monthly billing via invoice.

To sign up for a premier account, please contact our sales team at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.  

Python 2.7

PIL? NumPy? Concurrent requests? Python 2.7 has it all, and today we’re opening up Python 2.7 as an experimental release. We’ve put together a list of all the known differences between the current 2.5 runtime and the new runtime.

Overall Changes

We know that bumping up against hard limits can be frustrating, and we’ve talked all year about our continued push to lift our system limits. With this release we are raising several of these:

• Request Duration: The frontend request deadline has been increased from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. We’ve increased the maximum URLFetch deadline to match from 10 seconds to 60 seconds.
• File limits: We’ve increased the number of files you can upload with your application from 3,000 to 10,000 files, and the file size limit has also been increased from 10MB to 32MB.
• API Limits: Post payloads for URLFetches are now capped at 5MB instead of 1MB.

We’re also announcing several limited preview features and trusted tester programs:

• Cloud SQL Preview: We announced last week that we are offering a preview of SQL support in App Engine. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
• Full-text Search: We are looking for early trusted testers for our long-anticipated Full-Text Search API. Please fill out this form if you’re interested in trying it out.
• Conversion API: Ever wanted to convert from text to PDF in your App? Then consider signing up as a trusted tester for the Conversion API.

Datastore

• Cross Group (XG) Transactions: For those who need transactional writes to entities in multiple entity groups (and that's everyone, right?), XG Transactions are just the thing. This feature uses two phase commit to make cross group writes atomic just like single group writes.

Platform Improvements

• Experimental Google Cloud Storage Integration: As Google Cloud Storage, formerly Google Storage for Developers, graduates from labs, we are improving our integration by adding access via the files API.
• Prediction API: Another of our friends graduating from labs is the Prediction API. Check out some of the App Engine examples in their getting started guide.

Of course, these are just the high level changes. This release is packed full of features and bug fixes, and as always, we welcome your feedback in the group.

Greg D'Alesandre is now the Senior Product Manager for App Engine after coming back from riding the Google Wave in Sydney. And he's obsessed with chocolate, no, seriously, obsessed.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor