Serverless announcements from Google Cloud Next 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Serverless announcements from Google Cloud Next 2018

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

56 pointssteren10 comments

A big one that lots of people have been asking for is AppEngine Python 3 support, which is part of this announcement (3.7.0 support for AppEngine standard).

https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/concepts/python-runt...

Is this for AppEngine standard or for Cloud Functions? I don't see any mention of python 3 on the appengine page: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/

Oh, I think you're right.

> Today we are announcing support for new second-generation App Engine standard runtimes such as Python 3.7

I'm still a bit confused what AppEngine 2nd gen is.

2nd gen is the new standard runtimes using gVisor. I had read comments by googlers here before that the first gen standard runtimes required a lot of custom work on their end to run on the Google infrastructure which was why they were a bit slow supporting new versions of php, java etc, while the new gvisor based runtimes should be easier to roll out updates.

The link you provided is for Google Cloud Functions, not AppEngine Standard, though TFA does mention Python 3.7 for both. Looks like AppEngine doesn't have docs up for the new, second generation, standard runtimes (which, aside from the new language versions, sound fundamentally more capable.)

Python 3.7 on the App Engine standard environment was announced today but not yet released to the public. We'll have more to share soon.

I've got to say that I've found Google's swirling messaging around serverless-as-a-service to be frustrating. Originally, it was App Engine, which was great: upload a bit of Java/Python and off you went.

Then that suddenly seemed to get expensive (https://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-a...).

Then, about 3 years ago, App Engine seemed to be Docker-only App Engine ("Using the App Engine flexible environment means that your application instances run within Docker containers on Google Compute Engine virtual machines") with little mention of the original upload-some-code App Engine.

Now there are the App Engine "Standard Environment" which is in "Beta" and the "Flexible Environment" which is GA.

Now it's old-is-new, upload-some-code App Engine by a different name. I think it would have been much more clear if, having to maintain legacy App Engine code+environments, they had released Google App Engine V2 and called "Flexible Environment" the "Container Environment" (but that would have been confusing with "Kubernetes Engine"...).

GCP's messaging seemed to have been much more coherent than AWS's but they seem to be catching up. What's next? A Lightsail competitor?

> Then, about 3 years ago, App Engine seemed to be Docker-only App Engine

No, when the Flexible Environments were introduced (the Docker-based ones), Standard continued.

> Now there are the App Engine "Standard Environment" which is in "Beta" and the "Flexible Environment" which is GA.

Standard Environments are mostly GA, what is in beta appears to be the new second-generation Standard Environments (Node.js 8 has been in beta, and now the newly announced Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 are in some nonpublic pre-GA state.)

I’m only half paying attention because this screams ‘fad’ and in already busy learning other things, but the longer this goes the more it looks a bit like the 80’s era techniques I learned about in a distributed computing class wayback when.

This feels like process migration with some special sauce added. Or a lower cost version of the Actor model.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s been too long since we talked about this stuff, but I’m having a hard time perceiving this as the new hotness. Feels more like a refinement.

"Severless"... I don't think it means what they're trying to make it mean. "Server management"-less, or "dedicated server"-less, because true serverless can only be some sort of p2p client-side-only infrastructure.

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