Java release notes

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This page details release note for the flexible environment. You might also want to refer to the App Engine release notes and the Cloud SDK release notes for changes to services and tooling.

In addition to the release notes below, you can also track known issues on the issue tracker.

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December 9, 2019

App Engine is changing the URLs that you use to send requests to your apps. You can 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 will soon be required for all new 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 9, 2019

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

March 4, 2019

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

January 7, 2019

You can now use WebSockets and session affinity to create persistent connections to an App Engine instance.

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

Improved access control documentation around deploying apps with IAM roles and service accounts:

October 31, 2017

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

October 11, 2017

Announced general availability of App Engine firewall.

October 2, 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.
If you have an existing domain mapping and SSL certificate, then it continues to function as expected. You can also upgrade to managed SSL certificates.
The gcloud commands and Admin API methods used to map custom domains are now generally available. This includes gcloud domains verify and apps.authorizedDomains.list. However, if you want to use managed SSL certificates, use the beta commands and methods that are specified in Securing Custom Domains with SSL.

September 11, 2017

For flexible runtimes compatible with the App Engine standard environment APIs (compat runtimes), App Engine standard environment Java SDK 1.9.56 includes updates to the appengine-web.xml file configuration to add support for subnetwork_name, session_affinity, and updated liveness and readiness health checks.

September 5, 2017

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

August 23, 2017

Beta release of the App Engine firewall.

August 1, 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 6, 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 9, 2017

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

April 11, 2017

Added information about upgrading from the App Engine Task Queue API in the compat runtimes to using Cloud Tasks in the flexible environment and added information for how to verify requests from the Task Queue API.

March 28, 2017

The flexible environment is now available in the europe-west region.

March 9, 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.
The .NET core runtime for the App Engine flexible environment is now in Beta.

December 6th, 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 15th, 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:

The python-compat runtime.
The python27 runtime.
The java-compat runtime.
The jetty9-compat runtime.
The Go App Engine package no longer works on the App Engine flexible environment. Instead, use the cloud.google.com/go/... package.

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 2, 2016

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

March 24, 2016

App Engine Managed VMs is renamed to App Engine flexible environment.

February 3, 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.