Google App Engine Gets Some Needed Upgrades

Google App Engine has received some needed upgrades to its service that customers have been asking for over the past several months.

The issues came to a head last week after a developer posted 13 reasons why he and his group decided to drop Google Apps.

Some questioned the developer’s execution but overall many of the issues have also been noted in the Google Apps discussion boards.

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Customers have been asking for such things as an increase in the amount of data that can be uploaded in a URL Fetch and an increase in the 30 second limits to upload data.

In conversations yesterday, the Google App Engine team said the URL Fetch has been increased from one megabyte to 30 megabytes of data. The 30-second limit is now 10 minutes.

Detailed infrastructure upgrades have been needed to make the upgrades. The goal is to remove all limitations but that’s as far as Google engineers can do right now.

Added Features

Google has also added new features for the platform. Developers may push notifications into the browser for real-time commenting. Instances may be reserved in anticipation of spikes to the platform.

Road Map

Over the next few months, Google will add MapReduce to Google App Engine. This will help optimize applications and add a degree of personalization. Dedicated servers will allow for developers to build a game server if they wished.

Here’s a list of what’s to come:

Google App Engine needed these improvements. How does it compare to Amazon Web Services or Windows Azure? The new features make it far more usable for developers. AWS is still the king, and Azure is new to the block. Nonetheless, these improvements will go a long way in satisfying the developer community.

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