App Engine flexible environment custom runtimes release notes

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July 30, 2024

In the App Engine page in the Google Cloud console, you can now filter your existing App Engine versions by runtime lifecycle stages. After you apply this filter, the console displays a warning icon for App Engine versions that are approaching end of support, have reached end of support, are deprecated, and are decomissioned.

July 12, 2024

Deployments for new projects might be impacted from the following changes to org policies:

  • Starting in May 2024, Google Cloud enforces secure-by-default organization policies for all organization resources. This policy prevents App Engine from granting the Editor role to the App Engine default services accounts by default.
  • Starting in June 2024, Cloud Build has changed the default behavior for how Cloud Build uses service accounts in new projects. This change is detailed in Cloud Build Service Account Change. As a result of this change, new projects deploying versions for the first time may be using the default App Engine service account with insufficient permissions for deploying versions.

If you are impacted by this change, you can do the following:

  • Review the Cloud Build guidance on changes to the default service account and opt out of these changes.
  • Grant the Editor role to the App Engine default service account.

December 21, 2023

A warning message now appears before you publish a container image to a public repository.

August 07, 2023

Accessing a service that's prohibited by the Internal or Internal and Cloud Load Balancing ingress setting now results in a 404 rather than 403 error code.

March 24, 2023

You can now use ssh to log in to App Engine flexible environment instances that use only internal IP addresses.

December 13, 2022

You can now use any configured service account in your Cloud project as the app-level default service account, while creating and updating your App Engine applications.

November 09, 2022

The option to set IP mode to internal for App Engine flexible environment instances is now generally available.

May 18, 2022

Specifying a user-managed service account for each App Engine version during deployment is now a generally available.

July 19, 2021

Specifying a user-managed service account for each App Engine version during deployment is now available in preview. This feature lets you grant different privileges to each version, based on the specific tasks it performs, and avoid granting more privileges than necessary.

June 14, 2021

App Engine is now available in the us-west1 (Oregon), asia-southeast1 (Singapore), and asia-east1 (Taiwan) regions.

April 13, 2021

App Engine is now available in the europe-central2 region (Warsaw).

July 08, 2020

External HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now supported for App Engine via Serverless network endpoint groups. Notably, this feature allows you to use Cloud CDN with App Engine.
This feature is available in Beta.

April 20, 2020

App Engine is now available in the us-west4 region (Las Vegas, NV).

April 13, 2020

Quotas for sockets have been removed. There is no longer a limit on the number of socket connections or the amount of data you can send and receive through a socket.

March 13, 2020

App Engine is now available in the asia-northeast3 region (Seoul).

February 11, 2020

App Engine is changing the URLs that you use to send requests to your apps. URLs now include a region ID to help Google route your requests more efficiently and reliably. For example, an app can receive requests at https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com. This new URL is optional for existing apps and is provided for all new apps.

To ensure a smooth transition, we are slowly updating App Engine to use region IDs. If we haven't updated your Google Cloud project yet, you won't see a region ID for your app. Since the ID is optional for existing apps, you don't need to update URLs or make other changes once the region ID is available for your existing apps.

April 18, 2019

  • App Engine is now available in the asia-northeast2 region (Osaka, Japan).

April 15, 2019

  • App Engine is now available in the europe-west6 region (Zürich, Switzerland).

April 09, 2019

Cloud Tasks is now GA and can be used to set up tasks to be performed asychronously, outside of user requests.

March 04, 2019

Cloud Scheduler is now GA and can be used to set up scheduled units of work (cron jobs).

October 22, 2018

  • App Engine is now available in the asia-east2 region (Hong Kong).

July 10, 2018

  • App Engine is now available in the us-west2 region (Los Angeles).

January 10, 2018

  • App Engine is now available in the northamerica-northeast1 region (Montréal, Canada).

December 14, 2017

October 31, 2017

  • App Engine is now available in the asia-south1 region (Mumbai, India).

October 11, 2017

October 02, 2017

  • For the App Engine flexible environment, all responses are now compressed with gzip by default once you redeploy your app. No changes need to be made to your app.yaml file.

September 26, 2017

  • For the App Engine flexible environment, billing increments for instances are reduced from per-minute increments to per-second increments. Additionally, the minimum usage cost for instance resources is reduced from 10 minutes to 1 minute.

September 18, 2017

  • Updated health checks are now the default for new projects. To upgrade a project from legacy health checks, run the command gcloud app update --split-health-checks.

Legacy health checks will no longer be available after September 30th, 2018.

September 13, 2017

  • You can now use managed certificates to add SSL to your custom domain. Once you map your custom domain to your application, App Engine provisions an SSL certificate automatically and handles renewing the certificate before it expires and revoking it if you remove the custom domain. Managed certificates are in beta. For more information, see Securing Custom Domains with SSL.

September 05, 2017

  • App Engine is now available in the southamerica-east1 region (São Paulo, Brazil).

August 23, 2017

August 01, 2017

  • App Engine is now available in the europe-west3 region (Frankfurt, Germany).

July 18, 2017

  • App Engine is now available in the australia-southeast1 region (Sydney, Australia).

July 12, 2017

  • You can now use updated health checks, which allow you to use separate checks to confirm that your instance is running and ready to serve content. You must enable updated health checks, which are currently in Beta. For more information, see Health checks.
  • If you use updated health checks, deployments will fail if your application does not reach a ready state.

June 06, 2017

  • App Engine is now available in the europe-west2 region (London).
  • You can now use the beta-level features in the Admin API and gcloud command-line tool to create and manage your custom domains and SSL certificates.

May 09, 2017

  • App Engine is now available in the us-east4 region (North Virginia).

March 28, 2017

March 09, 2017

  • The App Engine flexible environment is now generally available (GA). You can run Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, and Go applications with a 99.95% SLA.
  • The PHP 7 runtime for the App Engine flexible environment is now in Beta.

December 06, 2016

  • New applications that have not been deployed in the flexible environment must specify env: true in the app.yaml file instead of vm:true. Applications that were previously deployed can continue to use vm:true but will need to switch to env:true in the future. For more details, see upgrade guide.

November 15, 2016

There is a new release of the App Engine flexible environment. To choose this environment, use env:flex instead of vm:true in your app.yaml configuration file. You can learn more about the details of this release by visiting the upgrade guide.

This release includes a few key new features:

  • Multi-zonal deployment support.
  • A modern networking stack with increased throughput.
  • Custom machine types.
  • Asia-Northeast1 region availability.

This release also marks the deprecation of a few features:

There are also a few breaking changes:

  • HTTP headers have been changed.
  • Environment variables have been changed.
  • There are multiple changes to the app.yaml schema.

For details and a full list of changes, visit the upgrade guide.

May 02, 2016

  • The Ruby runtime is now available for the App Engine flexible environment.

March 24, 2016

February 03, 2016

  • Container construction choices for Managed VMs

    The gcloud preview app deploy (and mvn gcloud:deploy) commands upload your artifacts to our servers and build a container to deploy your app to the Managed VM environment.

    There are two mechanisms for building the container image remotely. The default behavior is to build the container on a transient Compute Engine Virtual Machine which has Docker installed. Alternatively, you can use the Cloud Build service, which is in Beta. To use the Cloud Build service, follow these steps:

    1. Activate the Cloud Build API for your project.
    2. Use the command gcloud config set app/use_cloud_build True. This will cause all invocations of gcloud preview app deploy to use the service. To return to the default behavior, use the command gcloud config set app/use_cloud_build False.