Google Cloud recently announced the release of its Second Generation App Engine standard runtimes, an upgrade to the web framework and cloud computing platform for building apps. This update allows users to run their web apps with up-to-date versions of popular languages, frameworks and libraries, including the Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 libraries.
During Cloud Next, Google announced that Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 would be the versions of the new second generation runtimes it will support. Moreover, according to the announcement, the second generation runtimes including Python will remove many of the previous App Engine restrictions. Developers can now write portable web apps and microservices that take advantage of App Engine's auto-scaling, built-in security and pay-per-use billing model.
Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 are available in beta for the App Engine standard environment and also support the Google Cloud client libraries. Thus, developers can integrate GCP services into their app, and run it on App Engine. Note that Google is currently upgrading the App Engine APIs to make them accessible across all GCP platforms, and are not yet available in Second Generation runtimes, including Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2.
With the new runtimes in App, Engine developers can leverage Python 3 support for arbitrary third-party libraries, including those that rely on C code and native extensions. By adding libraries like Django 2.0, NumPy, scikit-learn or another library of choice to requirements.txt file, the App Engine will install them once the developer deploys the app. To deploy an app supporting PHP 7.2 developers need to download and install the Google Cloud SDK. Next, they can create app.yaml and index.php.
# app.yaml
runtime: php72
<?php
// index.php
echo 'Hello, World!';
Finally, they can deploy to the App Engine using the following command:
gcloud app deploy
Some Google App Engine customers are now using Python 3.7 on the App Engine standard. According to the announcement LumApps, a Paris-based provider of enterprise intranet software, has chosen App Engine to optimize for scale and developer productivity. Their CTO & co-founder, Elie Mélois, said:
With the new Python 3.7 runtime on App Engine standard, we were able to deploy our apps very quickly, using libraries that we wanted such as scikit. App Engine helped us scale our platform from zero to over 2.5M users, from three developers to 40—all this with only one DevOps person!
Developers can now write apps using Python 3.7 or PHP 7.2 on the App Engine standard environment and more details are available in the Google App Engine Python 3 Standard Environment documentation and Google App Engine PHP 7.2 Standard Environment documentation. Furthermore, Google will announce more App Engine releases soon.