New Version Of Google App Engine Offers Better App Performance, But It Comes With A Cost
Google Apple Engine (GAE) released a new versionn of its cloud platform today, offering dedicated memcache that allows developers to purchase in-memory data caching for their apps at a cost of 12 cents per gigabyte per hour. The new service is in addition to new features in GAE 1.8.2 such as better Git support and more PHP integrations.
According to a Google blog post, the new dedicated memcache feature allows the user to cache more data and drive up cache hit rates, which can also reduce Datastore costs and make applications faster. Data is always processed faster when it is close to the application. When the data is in-memory, there are no calls back to the server to retrieve the data. It’s right there ready to be served to the customer using the app.
Google has always had shared memcache, which allows for data to be stored for improved performance. But especially with large-scale applications, developers need more control. That’s the case apparently with Snapchat, which is using the dedicated memcache for its popular photo-sharing service to increase its hit rates and lower the costs associated with the Google Datastore.
Additionally, Google App Engine is offering deeper support for Git with the ability to deploy Python and PHP applications to App Engine with a “Source Push-to-Deploy” feature.
In GAE 1.8.2, Google is also improving its PHP run-time features with more storage integration. They have also launched a drop-in plug-in for WordPress that adds support for using Cloud Storage for storing uploaded content, and the Mail API for sending notifications. In addition they have updated the Python 2.7 interpreter to Python 2.7.5, which was recently released by the Python community and includes a number of bug fixes from Python 2.7.3 and Python 2.7.4.
Overall, it’s s a healthy update to GAE, which has become especially suited to apps with intense compute needs. It still lacks deep enterprise features, providing a window for other PaaS options, such as Red Hat’s OpenShift.
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