Cloud Platform Blog

Imagine: it's almost 3 AM and you would really like to speak with an expert about the best way to launch the new version of your application before your big event tomorrow. Who do you call?

Ever since we launched our support packages in February of this year, our support team has been helping our customers 24 hours per day seven days per week. And now we have made it even easier to sign up for a support package: starting now, you can instantly sign up for Silver or Gold support via the Google Cloud Console. That means that you no longer need to contact us to enable support on your cloud projects, and you will get instant access to our support center.

We have four support packages to choose from, to suit any need:

Bronze support – This package is available to all customers for free. We keep our documentation, white papers and best practice guides up to date to make sure anyone can make the most of our Cloud Platform, and we actively participate in the community forums to keep them relevant and useful. We are also available for any questions around billing that you might have.

Silver support – The Silver support package allows you to directly engage with one of our support engineers, and is particularly well suited for customers that just started developing on Cloud Platform. With this package, the support engineers can answer questions related to product functionality, service errors, and best practice architecture. The fee for Silver support is $150 per month.

Gold support – We created Gold support for customers that run critical, production-grade applications and services on our platform. This package comes with 24/7 coverage and direct access to our phone lines, just in case. Gold customers can discuss their specific use-case with us and questions related to application development, so that we provide a tailored solution to your issue. Gold support starts at $400 per month.

And if that is not enough, we also provide a Platinum support package that includes help from our team of technical account managers. They are experts on our products and platform and will take all the details of the specific solution into consideration to help design for top performance.

You can read further for more details, or if you’re ready, sign up for support now.

-Posted by Rolf Middendorp, Enterprise Program Manager

Developers come to Google Cloud Platform for a range of purposes - whether building a game that’s played by millions of users, crunching big data or sharing digital media around the world.

In this video, Rovio, Shutterfly, Leanplum, R/GA, Webfilings, Brightcove, Appscale and others tell us how they are harnessing the power of cloud computing at Google speed and scale.




-Posted by Benjamin Bechtolsheim, Product Marketing Manager

Once you get your data into Google BigQuery, you don’t have to worry about running out of machine capacity, because you use Google’s machines as if they were your own. But what if you want to transform your source data before putting it into BigQuery and you don’t have the server capacity to handle the transformation? In this case, how about using Google Compute Engine to run your Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processing? To learn how, read our paper Getting Started With Google BigQuery. To get started, download the sample ETL tool for Google Compute Engine from GitHub.

The sample ETL tool is an application that automates the steps of getting the Google Compute Engine instance up and running, and installing the software you need to rapidly design, create and execute the ETL workflow. The application includes a sample workflow that uses KNIME to help you understand the entire process, as shown here:


If you already have an established process for performing the ETL process to prepare the data and load it into Google Cloud Storage, but need a reliable way to load the data from there into BigQuery, we have a another sample application to help you. The Automated File Loader for BigQuery sample app demonstrates how to automate data loading from Google Cloud Storage to BigQuery.

This application uses the Cloud Storage Object Change Notification API to receive notifications that files have been uploaded to a bucket in Google Cloud Storage, then uses the BigQuery API to load the data from the bucket into BigQuery. Download it now from GitHub.



Both these sample applications accompany the article Getting Started With Google BigQuery, which provides an overview of the end-to-end process from loading data into BigQuery to visualization, and design practices that should be considered when using BigQuery.

-Posted by Wally Yau, Solutions Architect

Developers using Google Cloud Platform can now talk to each other, and to Googlers, in a brand-new Google+ Community.

The new community is where we will share information about official Google Cloud Platform developer programs and events with you, to help more people get engaged. You can also get help from your peers, share your own stories and contributions, and find great developers to invite to join your project.

Along with our other forums, such as StackOverflow, the Google+ community helps newcomers find the right resources more quickly.

How can you contribute? There are many ways:

• If you blog or know of any articles about Google Cloud Platform, you can share them with your fellow cloud developers in the new community.
• This also goes for podcasters and video bloggers (vloggers). If your content is relevant to the Google Cloud Platform community, you can share it here.
• If you are a public speaker, you can use the community to share a link to the event where you’ll be giving your relevant talk.
• If you spend a lot of time helping people with technical questions, you can use the community to help new folks find answers and get started, for example by pointing them to the correct StackOverflow tag.
• Got other kinds of relevant content? Share it here! Tutorials, podcast episodes, and videos of presentations about Google Cloud Platform—they’re all welcome in the new community space.

We’re just starting out with this new community, but we have big plans, and we want your ideas for making this space more useful and engaging for you, too. Share them with us in the community.

-Posted by Alex Maier, Google Cloud Platform Community Manager

Do you need an environment that seamlessly scales to meet demand? Do multiple teams develop your app using a variety of programming languages? Do you need to mix managed applications and self-serve virtual machines running a variety of separate services? Google Cloud Platform has you covered on all fronts.

Take a look at our latest paper to learn how to overcome the challenges of deploying large applications in Cloud Platform. Our paper discusses a solution that shows how to use the right tools for:

• Different developer expertise
• Different data storage requirements
• Interactive and batch processing requirements
• Custom analysis engines
• Logically separate business components

Our paper walks through a real-world scenario of building a video sharing community. In this scenario, users upload videos from a mobile phone, the content is transcoded for playback in multiple formats and is presented on a web community site for watching and commenting.
Our sample solution showcases Google App Engine applications written in PHP, Java and Python. We use Google Cloud SQL for storing video metadata, to capitalize on the popularity and reduced learning curve of MySQL, and we store the videos in Google Cloud Storage for speed and scalability. The mobile client is written in Java and runs on Android. Hadoop clusters running on Google Compute Engine analyze and add sentiments to users' comments. And the whole shebang is orchestrated by another App Engine application. To learn how to build a solution like this yourself, get started now by reading all about it.

-Posted by Brian Lynch, Solutions Architect

We’re back with Google App Engine 1.8.5, and this release focuses on an upgrade to the Search API and improvements to the PHP runtime. Next week we’ll be at Zendcon, one of the largest conferences for PHP developers, where we’ll have some cool things to share about the PHP runtime.

Search API is now Generally Available
Surfacing Google technology to developers everywhere is one of our goals with Cloud Platform. The Search API does exactly this. With just a few lines of code, you can use Google Search technology to index and query millions of documents that contain structured data. Today, we’re making the Search API Generally Available so any developer can dive in and get started.

To understand how easy it is to get going with the API, let’s say you were a real estate company that wanted to add search capabilities. To do so, we’ll first import the Search library, and add some listings (referred to generically as Documents in the Search world).

from google.appengine.api import search

listingLocation = search.GeoPoint(37.78, -122.39)
listing = search.Document(
    fields=[
       search.TextField(name='description', value='Great condo in the city'),
       search.NumberField(name='bedrooms', value=2),
       search.GeoField(name='location', value=listingLocation)
       # omitting the other fields for this example 
       ])

Next we add the newly created listing to our index using the put() method.

try:
    index = search.Index(name='listingsForSale')
    index.put(listing)
except search.Error:
    logging.exception('Make sure you handle this error')

After we’ve added documents to an index, we’ll grab an index and specify our search query.

index = search.Index(name='listingsForSale')

# search for listings within 8050 meters (~5 miles) of the 94109 zip code
query_string = 'distance(location, geopoint(37.7929, -122.4212)) < 8050'

Finally we’ll perform the search and iterate over the results.

try:
    results = index.search(query_string)
    # Iterate over the documents in the results
    for scored_document in results:
        pass  # handle results
except search.Error:
    logging.exception('...and this one too')

And that’s just a small example. The Search API allows developers to:

• index Atom, Text, HTML, Number, Date, Geopoint fields
• perform queries across all field types, including geospatial queries, partial text matching
• score and sort results

We have many customers using the Search API for a variety of use cases. Key Ingredient, for example, uses the Search API to allow users to perform searches over the 1.6 million recipes in their database. Harlan Beverly, their CEO, said, “Our users are often shocked and delighted by the speed of our search results and our site overall.”

By moving to GA, the Search API is fully supported and comes with a monthly 99.95% SLA. For more information, be sure to check out our docs (Python and Java).

Improvements to the PHP runtime
The Cloud Platform team focuses a lot on providing great developer tools so that you can be as agile as possible in development. In this release, we’ve packaged a PHP interpreter binary in the Windows and Macintosh SDKs, including integration with the App Engine launcher, so that you no longer need to install PHP yourself.

We also believe modularized applications are the right way to go for architecting solutions in the cloud. So the PHP runtime now supports App Engine modules – the ability to split out large-scale applications into logical components that are able to share stateful services and communicate securely.

Finally, we’ve added the Logs API to the PHP runtime, which provides you access to the application and and request logs for your application.

That’s a lot of PHP goodness in 1.8.5, and we’re accepting more users, so sign up to give it a try.

Eclipse Tooling
We took your feedback that our Google Plugin for Eclipse should fully support Cloud Endpoints in the Eclipse standard Web Tools Platform and Java EAR files which are familiar to many Java developers as the most common pattern used in Eclipse for on-premise and cloud environments. Now, check out how to add an App Engine backend to your Android or iOS mobile app.

The complete list of features and bug fixes for 1.8.5 can be found in our release notes. For App Engine coding questions and answers check us out on Stack Overflow, and for general discussion and feedback, find us on our Google Group.

-Posted by Chris Ramsdale, Product Manager

Today's guest post comes from Dr. Chandra Krintz, co-founder and CTO of AppScale Systems. AppScale Systems is the team behind AppScale, the open source cloud platform that brings portability and failover to App Engine applications.

Recently, there have been interesting discussions around lock in and Google App Engine. With hosted cloud services, there is always a concern that the developers will find the barrier to exit too high. We have partnered with Google to relieve developers of the burden of porting their App Engine apps to other deployment targets via our cloud platform, AppScale.

App Engine developers can now execute their apps either on App Engine in the cloud using Google’s infrastructure or on AppScale over resources they control. To enable this, AppScale emulates App Engine and mirrors its APIs using proven and distributed open source technologies.

The video below shows how to setup AppScale and deploy your App Engine apps over Google Compute Engine. Users can also deploy AppScale over virtualized clusters, on-premise data centers, and public and private cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, and OpenStack. Deploying the platform consists of downloading or creating a virtual machine image with the AppScale code base, and using the AppScale tool chain to start the platform services across a number of virtual machine instances.



AppScale automatically deploys, configures, and scales your apps and their service ecosystems, so that you don't have to. Because the platform is open source, you can also customize and optimize the system according to your needs, and we can help.

AppScale Systems is a Google Cloud Platform Technology Partner and collaborates with Red Hat and Google on the Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) project. Learn more about AppScale and try it today at AppScale.com. Follow us on Twitter (@appscalecloud) or join our community of contributors and ask questions via the AppScale Community Google Group and IRC channel (#appscale).

-Contributed by Chandra Krintz, co-founder and CTO of AppScale Systems