Just a quick blurb for now: the software my group works on, AppScale, has a new version out! It adds support for the Cassandra and Voldemort databases as well as the ability to deploy your Google App Engine apps to Amazon EC2, so check it out if that’s what you’re into! Here’s the changelog for the sake of completeness:
Now compatible with Python Google App Engine 1.2.3
Addition of support for Voldemort and Cassandra
MySQL bug fix allowing for parallel API nodes
Eucalyptus 1.5.2 support
Amazon AWS EC2 public image available (ami-7136d618)
Support for running Ubuntu Jaunty systems
Single node deployments (Cassandra or Voldemort only)
Ability to delete applications from a running deployment
Python2.6 for everything except Google App Engine (Python2.5)
With version 1.2.3 of Google App Engine comes the Task Queue API, which gives the ability to run tasks asynchronously in the background. The only downside is that on the ‘lite’ edition that they give you to test it out on, the tasks don’t run automatically. The rationale is solid: you should control when they run so that you can debug your app and so forth. However, if for some reason you wanted to have them run automatically (which we needed for AppScale), a few changes had to be made. Furthermore, there are a number of efforts to use the lite SDK with real databases, and those maintainers may find this to be a helpful contribution. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the more common requests we hear at the AppScale team is to put out screencasts so people can see AppScale in action without having to download it and try it out on their own. So I put together a short little screencast showing the basic utilities and a sample run. Unfortunately, the quality isn’t that great since I’m still figuring out how to optimize it for YouTube, but it’s something we will work out over time. Enjoy!
Over the last few months we’ve been working away on something that we think is pretty cool, and just two weeks ago we finally released the first version of it (which was naturally followed up by another release to fix the bugs in the first). It’s something we call AppScale, a platform on which you can run Google App Engine apps. But how does it differ from the platform that Google gives you to run App Engine apps on your local computer or the platform they host it in? Let’s explore that together!
