Updates from the Google App Engine team (Fall 2021)

[wescpy]

The App Engine team at Google Cloud had a flurry of announcements and product updates over the past few months. In case you missed them, we've summarized them here with relevant links.

• New features to better secure your Google App Engine apps (Aug 2021) —  Introducing a pair of networking and security features:
• Egress Controls for Serverless VPC Access — consistent app (static) outbound IP address
• User-managed service accounts — custom service accounts to restrict apps to only the permissions necessary, following the best practice of "least privileges"
• Exploring serverless with a nebulous app (Sep 2021) — Deploy/shift the same app to App Engine, Cloud Functions, or Cloud Run without any code changes, and show how to access Cloud APIs from serverless
• Extending support for App Engine bundled services (Sep 2021) — Legacy App Engine APIs/bundled services, e.g., Memcache, Datastore, etc., were left out of the next-generation service (to fight against "vendor lock-in" not because they were deprecated). Many matured into standalone products, e.g., Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Datastore, etc., respectively anyway. To help with updating language versions (e.g., Python 2 to 3, Java 8 to 11, etc.), we've added many of these bundled services "back" to the latest App Engine runtimes.
• Modernizing your serverless applications (Sep 2021) — Introducing codelabs (hands-on tutorials) and new video series to help customers migrate to standalone services to modernize & make their apps more portable (second-generation App Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run; Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Compute Engine VMs; other cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, on-prem, etc.):
• App Engine webapp2 to Flask
• App Engine taskqueue to Cloud Tasks (push queues)
• App Engine ndb (Datastore) to Cloud NDB 
• Cloud NDB to Cloud Datastore
• App Engine to Cloud Run (with Docker or without Docker using Cloud Buildpacks)
• More are on the way…

While we are working hard to improve your App Engine experience, recognize App Engine is no longer the only serverless option available from Google Cloud:

• If you don't have an entire app, have single-function utilities or microservices, Cloud Functions is a great alternative; it also supports event-driven workloads
• For those leveraging containerization as part of their app modernization or software development workflows or wish to avoid some of the constraints from App Engine or Cloud Functions, consider Cloud Run.

Both Cloud Functions and Cloud Run have similar execution profiles, are pay-per-use, deploy quickly, and autoscale as needed, just like what you're used to from App Engine. Providing a more complete serverless product suite that meets all your use cases and workloads is one of the goals of the Google Cloud serverless team.

[dchiesa1]

@wescpy - is this (serverless) the right forum to ask about Cloud Memorystore? 

[wescpy]

It depends. If you're accessing Memorystore from a serverless app, probably. Otherwise, it may be better to ask in the Memorystore for Redis or Memorystore for memcached groups, depending on which caching engine you're using.