App Engine and IPv6 Round 2

Back in March, we announced that all App Engine apps hosted on appspot.com would be reachable over IPv6, from ISPs enrolled in the Google over IPv6 program.

Today, were adding the same service to all domains hosted by ghs.google.com. If your App Engine app runs on your own domain name using Google Apps, then be sure to review our earlier blog post, which discusses the caveats of parsing client IP addresses, and how to use the SixXS Gateway to test your site over IPv6.

Currently, the Google over IPv6 program presents AAAA records only to ISPs within our whitelist. This helps ensure that our services remain reliable, by reducing exposure to clients with broken IPv6 connectivity. As the maturity of IPv6 deployment improves, we expect this whitelist to grow, eventually disappearing as it encompasses the entire Internet.

That said, we know that some of you are fans of IPv6 who would prefer to skip the whitelist, and offer dual-stack service to everyone immediately. To make your domain bypass the whitelist, just change your CNAME pointer from ghs.google.com to ghs46.google.com. Please note that, while ghs46 will cause your App Engine site to receive a larger fraction of its traffic over IPv6, our studies show that it may make your site slow or unreachable for up to 0.1% of clients across the Internet, so use this alternate domain with care.

As before, if you experience any problems with IPv6 serving and App Engine, please report it in the App Engine issue tracker or post about it in the App Engine discussion group.

Posted by Paul + the App Engine Traffic Team

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App Engine SDK 1 3 1 Including Major Improvements to Datastore!

We are excited to announce the release of version 1.3.1 of the App Engine SDK for both Python and Java. While this release contains plenty of new features and fixes, weve concentrated on using our very first SDK release of 2010 to improve the heart of many App Engine applications: the Datastore.



Here are the three major improvements that 1.3.1 has in store for datastore users:

• Datastore Query Cursors - Cursors allow applications to save and bookmark their progress through a query, so that it can be resumed later. This works great in combination with paging URLs, as well as processing in the Task Queue API, but there are many other uses. Watch for an upcoming blog post that explores Cursors in the near future. Theyre also really handy in the context of the next change...
• No more 1000 result limit - Thats right: with addition of Cursors and the culmination of many smaller Datastore stability and performance improvements over the last few months, were now confident enough to remove the maximum result limit altogether. Whether youre doing a fetch, iterating, or using a Cursor, theres no limits on the number of results.
• Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries - Weve heard a lot of feedback that you dont want to deal with the Datastores sporadic errors. In response, App Engine now automatically retries all datastore calls (with the exception of transaction commits) when your applications encounters a datastore error caused by being unable to reach Bigtable. Datastore retries automatically builds in what many of you have been doing in your code already, and our tests have shown it drastically reduces the number of errors your application experiences (by up to 3-4x error reduction for puts, 10-30x for gets).
  

But even with our focus on the Datastore, we were able to sneak in a quite a number of other new goodies into 1.3.1 as well:



For Python, weve included the AppStats RPC instrumentation library. AppStats lets users easily profile the performance of calls from their app to the App Engine backend services to identify and isolate issues such as ineffective caching, bottlenecks, and redundant RPC calls in their app. (A Java version is in beta testing now.)



And for Java, weve included a comprehensive new unit-testing framework for your App Engine apps. The unit-testing framework enables you to test your application code in a natural, fully supported manner, and also allows you to integrate your App Engine apps into other existing testing and automation frameworks.



The list of changes in 1.3.1 goes on and on (Custom Admin Console pages! Support for wildcard domain mappings! Java precompilation on by default for all applications!), so make sure to download the new version and read our release notes for the complete list (Python, Java).



Posted by the App Engine Team

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App Engine at a Conference Near You this Winter!

Happy New Year Everyone!

Were excited to be kicking off a new year, and you can expect to find many new exciting features coming to App Engine in the coming months. In addition to Google I/O 2010 coming up in May -- more on this below -- members of the App Engine team may be visiting a conference near you this quarter. Here is the full list:

2010 Jan 24-30 - Snow Sprint 2010 - Bürserberg, Austria - Nick Johnson

2010 Jan 26-27 - Jfokus - Stockholm - Patrick Chanezon

2010 Jan 28 - PROSA - Copenhagen - Patrick Chanezon

2010 Feb 17-21 - PyCon 2010 - Atlanta - Guido van Rossum, Wesley Chun, Joe Gregorio, Brett Slatkin, Andy Smith

2010 Feb 27 - Dare 2B Digital - Los Altos Hills - Wesley Chun

2010 Mar 10-12 - ConFoo.ca 2010 - Montreal - Patrick Chanezon

2010 Mar 12-16 - SXSW Interactive - Austin - Patrick Chanezon, Brett Slatkin, Sean Lynch

2010 Mar 15-18 - Cloud Connect - Santa Clara - Chris Schalk, Wesley Chun, Ikai Lan

2010 Mar 17-19 - ServerSide Java Symposium - Las Vegas - Max Ross

Although not happening until next quarter, save a place in your calendar and book your travel for May 19-20 to San Francisco for Google I/O 2010. This year will be a blockbuster, featuring your favorite Google technologies and product announcements! There are at least 6 App Engine sessions planned. Register NOW!!

In addition to I/O, Google will be hosting a variety of DevFests in Asia late this winter. Keep an eye out for specific dates and locations on the Google Developer Events Calendar.

We would love to meet with App Engine developers at any of these events! Also be sure to follow @app_engine on Twitter for ongoing announcements as well as our Reddit tag for any relevant App Engine news.

Posted by Wesley Chun, App Engine team

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