Java Release Notes

Python |Java |Node.js |Go |Ruby |PHP |.NET

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.

August 1, 2017

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

July 18, 2017

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

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 (alpha) 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 Container Builder service, which is in Beta. To use the Container Builder service, follow these steps:

  1. Activate the Container Builder 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.