Happy New Year from the App Engine team

Posted by Peter S Magnusson, Engineering Director

(Cross-posted from the Google App Engine blog)

Happy New Year! As we return from our New Year's celebrations, brush the dust off our workstations and gear up for our first release of 2012, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at improvements we have made and what developers have accomplished with App Engine in 2011.

Let’s start with the features and functionality we added last year:

• Language Support: We released the initial version of Python 2.7 support and added Go as an experimental runtime.
• Storage: We launched the High Replication Datastore and added support for the Files API in Python and Java. We also announced the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, a familiar relational database in a fully managed cloud environment.
• Computation: We introduced Backends for building larger, long-lived and/or memory intensive infrastructure, Pull Queues to allow developers to “pull” tasks from a queue as applications are ready to process them and two larger Frontend instance classes. We also released the GAE MapReduce framework as an experimental feature for Python.
• Security: We successfully completed the audit process for the SAS70 Type II, SSAE 16 Type II, and ISAE 3402 Type II standards.
• Business Readiness: We modified our SLA, billing plans, and service limits and now offer fully supported Premier Accounts.

Best of all, with your continued support we accomplished our goal of graduating from preview and became a full fledged Google product.

We’ve seen excellent growth and adoption over the past year, with businesses like Pulse, Evite and Best Buy choosing App Engine for their applications. Even St. James’s Palace chose App Engine to host the Royal Wedding site. We had so much fun collaborating with 17 of the world’s most renowned museums for the Google Art Project and with other Googlers building iGoogle gadgets and Doodles on App Engine. We’ve added more than 1 million registered applications and have more than 150,000 active developers on the App Engine platform generating more than 5 billion page hits per day.

Back in our first blog post in 2008, we asked you to “start your engines” and what a ride we’ve taken. Thank you for making 2011 our best year yet and here’s to making 2012 even better!