App Engine second generation runtimes now get double the memory; plus Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 now generally available

Last year, we announced App Engine second generation runtimes, which let you use any language library, have direct network access, and connect to Google Cloud VPC Networks, giving you a more idiomatic developer experience, support for native modules and faster execution. Today, we are excited to announce that all App Engine second generation runtime instances will receive double the memory. In addition, Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 runtimes for App Engine standard are now generally available.

Doubling the RAM for all App Engine second generation applications lets them more easily  load language libraries or scale vertically to increase concurrency via multiprocessing or multithreading. This increased memory limit is already available for all apps running second generation runtimes; you don’t need to take any action to receive the additional memory. This upgrade comes at no additional cost.

Please refer to the table below for more information on memory associated with each instance class.

In the past year, we’ve announced a number of second generation runtimes, including Node.js 10, PHP 7.2, Python 3.7, and Ruby 2.5 (alpha). Today we are announcing the general availability of two new runtimes: Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3.

A1 Comms is one of the UK’s leading mobile phone and telecommunication providers, and is using PHP to as it transforms its business from brick-and-mortar to online retail:

“Moving to second generation runtimes has saved us a lot of debugging time and helped us increase performance by at least 50%. The PHP 7.3 runtime is giving our developers the best of the bleeding edge for Laravel compatibility and speed, while still providing automatic security patching to meet our compliance requirements. It exceeds our expectations for reliability. The inclusion of native support for the OpenCensus module for Stackdriver Trace is also something we are excited about. .” - Sam Melrose,  System Engineer, A1 Comms

Additionally, second generation runtimes are interoperable with our recently released Cloud Run, a serverless compute offering that allows you to run any stateless container in a fully managed fashion or on top of an existing GKE cluster. You can take apps that were built on App Engine second generation runtimes and move them to Cloud Run, or vice-versa.

Forget infrastructure and focus on your users
While there are a lot of new things to love about second generation runtimes, the core value for App Engine remains: the service allows developers and companies to focus on creating great software while taking advantage of Google Cloud’s world class operations and infrastructure to scale, monitor, and manage their applications.

“App Engine has literally been a game changer for us. Since migrating to it, I've yet to have a board meeting where we need to discuss availability or capacity or any other reason for downtime. In fact, during Black Friday while some competitors’ websites slowed or went down, our response time actually improved.”  - Jonathan Liversidge,  IT Director, A1 Comms

App Engine Second Generation runtimes are available for use immediately, so start building your app today.