Simplifying App Engine updates: extending support for bundled services

Today, we’re announcing changes to App Engine to make it easier for early adopters to modernize their applications. When App Engine launched in 2008, it was designed as a stand-alone platform and included a number of proprietary bundled services. In 2018, we announced second-generation App Engine standard runtimes, which unlocked contemporary versions of Python, Java, Go, and PHP. These second-generation runtimes were designed to be idiomatic, allowing customers to take advantage of the broad ecosystem of services and tools that were now available.  

However, these updated runtimes did not support many of the bundled services—like Memcache and Task Queues—that customers using first-generation runtimes relied upon. This made it difficult for customers to update to these newer runtimes. 

To simplify the update process for first generation runtime customers, we’re now adding support for many of these original bundled services to the second-generation runtimes.

Broader support for App Engine bundled services

We’re announcing the Public Preview of the App Engine bundled services in the second-generation runtimes for Java, Python, and Go (with PHP available in Private Preview). These bundled services are the exact same services that customers have been using for years, and they’re now accessible from second-generation runtimes via idiomatic libraries.

Accessing the bundled services from second-generation runtimes can be done with few, if any, changes to code. Other than the code changes that are required to update to newer language versions (such as those needed to move from Python 2 to 3) most customers only have to add a setting to their app.yaml and import the new library.

Incremental modernization – on your terms

Many of these bundled services have dedicated Google Cloud alternatives. For example, App Engine Blobstore can be replaced with Cloud Storage. However, we recognize that customers using first-generation runtimes aren’t always able to make significant changes to their apps as quickly as they’d like in order to adopt newer runtimes.  

Allowing access to these bundled services enables customers to take a more incremental approach, first updating their apps to contemporary runtimes, then (if they so choose) migrating to dedicated alternative services. We will continue to support the App Engine bundled services long-term, but we still recommend that customers consider migrating to the dedicated alternatives to take advantage of ongoing improvements and new features.

As the longest-running Google Cloud service, App Engine has a great history and many long-term customers. We are committed to supporting App Engine in the long term and helping our customers continue to grow and evolve on Google Cloud.  

Next steps

To learn more about how to use the App Engine bundled services in second-generation runtimes, see the documentation. For resources on migrating off of the bundled services, see the migration guides (Python, Java, Go), and related videos.