Google AppEngine has made some great changes in version 1.3.1 that have caused some design decisions from regular apps to the cloud.

New Cursors Eliminate 1000 Row Limit in Datastore

Previously, developers could only easily get the first 1000-2000 rows of any query or filter easily.  This is because BigTable stores data in a way that fetching beyond that was difficult.  So if you wanted to get rows 3000-4000 or better yet 3010-3020 for a small page of data, you would have to devise a system to increment the rows previously and then have a marker to filter by that marker, then ensure they were in order.  It was troublesome and grew linearly in response times the deeper you needed to go.

With Cursors you can now put in a filter and page through the data, they seemingly encapsulated the difficult part of dealing with their cloud datastore structure and hopefully sped up the deep queried needed in such tools as logs, leaderboards, large lists and well, just about any web app now with any amount of data where you need to page deep.  And this will allow faster development of data applications for developers not used to cloud databases as most RDBMS have decent cursor/paging systems.

Wildcard Domains

If you are building a service where people get a username or where you want to shorten urls you can now use wildcard domains.  Domains like mybusiness.inventoryserviceapp.com instead of www.inventoryserviceapp.com/mybusinessapp.  It feels more personalized and is good for software as a service apps.  These are now possible on Google AppEngine.

You can use wildcards to map subdomains at any level, starting at third-level subdomains. For example, if your domain is example.com and you enter text in the web address field:

Entering * maps all subdomains of example.com to your app.

Entering *.private maps all subdomains of private.example.com to your app.

Entering *.nichol.sharks.nhl maps all subdomains of nichol.sharks.nhl.example.com to your app.

Entering *.excogitate.system maps all subdomains of excogitate.system.example.com to your app.

If you use Google Apps with other subdomains on your domain, such as sites and mail, those mappings have higher priority and are matched first, before any wildcard mapping takes place. In addition, if you have other App Engine apps mapped to other subdomains, those mappings also have higher priority than any wildcard mapping.

Note that some DNS providers might not work with wildcard subdomain mapping. In particular, a DNS provider must permit wildcards in CNAME host entries.

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Great changes in this update of the engine and built in a scalable way in the cloud.  As they refine and learn more about usage there will be more great changes making it less of a burden to move to the cloud, or better yet convincing others to move to Google AppEngine. Other stuff in this build that is great is the AppStats instrumentation apis, custom admin console and more…

Google AppEngine continues to progress and it couldn’t come at a better time for me working on 4 instances/apps on google appengine.

They have remove limits on high CPU calls, raised the request timeout to 30 seconds, and raised the per file limit to 10MB!

Now we just need it to get out of beta in some format for getting clients loaded up on it.

We’re very excited today to announce that we’ve raised limits on several App Engine operations:

• No more “High CPU Requests”! App Engine Apps were once allowed no more than 2 CPU-intensive requests per minute. We’ve made some adjustments to the way we handle requests, and have eliminated this limitation altogether. To learn more about how this works and the implications for your app, see our documentation.
• Response deadline raised to 30 seconds. The amount of time an App Engine app can take to respond to an incoming request has been raised from 10 to 30 seconds! There are limits on the number of simultaneous active requests an application can process at any given moment–see our docs to learn more.
• Size limits on code files, static files, and requests/responses raised to 10MB! App Engine apps can now receive requests and send responses of up to 10MB in size, and users can upload 10MB code and static files as well. Note that API requests (e.g. memcache.set(), db.put()) are still limited to 1MB in size.

Google AppEngine SDK has been updated to 1.1.9 and a feature bug has been closed out by Guido that now has support for urllib and urllib2 libraries which nearly every library made with python uses as some point.  This is great that they are working to support (safely with scalability) the common libraries that Pythonistas expect.

I really hope Google AppEngine can go 1.0 soon.  After the official launch of Amazon EC2 and other services out of beta, mosso, joyent etc it is getting hard to convince people to build on it until it goes out of beta.

Hoping for two things, 1.0 of Google AppEngine and support of Django 1.0 on that release officially. It is possible to run Django 1.0.x on the engine but it is painful using all that disk space (django has lots of files and google has a 1,000 file limit).

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=61

Google AppEngine blog recently announced the 6 month roadmap.  I was hoping an out of beta state was to come soon but looks like it will be a gmail type beta length.  But it is still usable and more stable with high availability than anything that s small company can provide.  I hope they plan to go live to 1.0 this year, I was hoping the EC2 announcements and official launch of other cloud based offerings would drive them to do that.  It makes it much easier to justify using it for production code. I was also hoping for an update to the included django to 1.0.

With that said I digress, the roadmap looks very nice.  Jabber/XMPP support, background processesses, sending and receiving and processing inbound and outbound email.

The App Engine team has been plugging away and we’re excited about some pretty big announcements in the near future. In the meantime, we decided to refresh our App Engine roadmap for the next six months with some of the great new APIs in our pipeline:

• Support for running scheduled tasks
• Task queues for performing background processing
• Ability to receive and process incoming email
• Support for sending and receiving XMPP (Jabber) messages

As always, keep in mind that development schedules are notoriously difficult to predict, and release dates may change as work progresses. We’ll do our best to update this roadmap as our engineers continue development and keep you abreast of any changes!

Amazon released a web based tool, in addition to their ElasticFox Firefox plugin, that allows AWS EC2 Management.  Other consoles will be added soon.

I have been saying for some time that cloud based offerings with great tools will win out.  Making it simple to setup and manage cloud tools, with tools and hopefully APIs to the tools so that these can be aggreated, will win over hosting clients and be a value add for the cloud providers of today Google App Engine, Amazon AWS, Mosso, Joyent, SliceHost etc.

Today we’re announcing the availability of the Web-based AWS Management Console, which in this first release provides management of your Amazon EC2 environment via a point-and-click interface. A number of management tools already exist: for example a popular Firefox extension known as Elasticfox; however as you read more of this post I believe you’ll agree that the new console is compelling–especially when it’s time to log in as a new AWS developer.

Microsoft launched the Azure cloud based platform at the PDC today.  Microsoft has launched many file storage services that were their cloud offerings to date in Mesh, Foldershare, Groove and more.  Azure is what appears to be a real cloud platform to compete with Amazon and Google rather than just storage hosting.

Build new applications in the cloud – or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.

It appears so far that it is pretty Microsoft centric for tool support.  Of course the software and servers will be Windows.  This week and last, Microsoft platforms have made their way into the cloud platforms at Amazon and now Microsoft.  Google also recently announced the support of Java.  Another set of aquisitions at Rackspace in the buying of Slicehost and JungleDisk also seem to show the space heating up and the companies all believing in the cloud platform emergence and evolution that seems to be happening.

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta, it is about time some of these services actually launched.  It is hard to convince people to use the cloud layer without being out of beta (AppEngine when’s it gonna happen huh?).

Amazon also launches with windows support, SQL Server support and much more.  This is great news in times where budgets are tight and people want to start scalable businesses but want to only pay for what is used.  The cloud layer will be a very attractive option to many.

Learn more about the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. There are already lots of great simple toos like ElasticFox (Firefox EC2 Extension) to help manage your AMIs from a browser.  You can start and stop armies of configured servers from a little extension in your browser.

Developers are getting many tools to build great things.  We hope more products are out of beta soon like AppEngine.

AppEngine is getting an update to it’s next available language besides Python (my particular favorite) in Java.  Apparently the top candidates were C++, Java and C# support for AppEngine but Java has been added due to the overwhelming library and developer support.

Microsoft also has been playing with entering the cloud with Mesh and now with “Strata”.  This would be a cloud for .NET developers.

There are already cloud providers for .NET mainly in Mosso’s offerings of any language being cloud enabled. But one from Microsoft will probably draw all the .NET developers to it like most Microsoft offerings.

Also, Amazon EC2 recently announced support for MS SQL Server and Windows servers.  So really any platform can also be used in Amazon EC2 in Amazon Machine Images. This took longer to happen due to the licensing per processor and server that most Microsoft software has.

This won’t be changing things much for me in the near term but having more platforms available in the cloud and on cloud systems is the natural progression.  At some point a platform might have advantages in cheaper processing but for now Python with AppEngine is still the best bet.

Google AppEngine is alot of fun, not only is it a good excuse to use Python but it is a touch of the future and lots of possibilities for programmers and engineers from all sized businesses to use. When they opened the gates I was one of the lucky 10,000 to get in. So what did I do, I setup three apps before I even knew that was the limit.  Then I was stuck.  Well today you now have up to 10 apps that you can run on appspot or your own domain. Make sure to update your SDK.

Next question is, when are they going to launch this out of beta?  I want to start using it for business.

We’re happy to announce we’ve released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:

• More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
• Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
• Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application’s logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py –help for more information on how to download your logs.
• Send email as logged in user: If you’re using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.

Be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. Have more changes you’d like to see with App Engine? Let us know in our Google Group!

Today Mosso, a cloud provider that runs off of Rackspace and supports lots of languages, launched CloudFS to compete with Amazon S3.

CloudFS is new, untested but a bit cheaper than Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is where mainly ‘buckets’ of data of any content type can be stored and retrieved by a unique key across all resources. This is useful for image, content and media hosting and charges by the GB usually less than .15 cents per GB.

About CloudFS