Python 3 is now available on App Engine standard environment

Exciting release of the 2nd generation of App Engine runtimes. I'm really excited to see how the community receives this product.

It uses the gVisor sandbox, allowing sandboxing at the process level. This in turns allow for fast turning up and scaling of apps.

Disclosure: I work for Google, on the App Engine Runtimes team.

Thanks for supporting this cutting edge technology. I really hope it catches on.

Out of curiosity, why did this take 10 years?

Article says "YES!"

> This new runtime allows you to take advantage of Python's vibrant ecosystem of open-source libraries and frameworks. While the Python 2 runtime only allowed the use of specific versions of whitelisted libraries, Python 3 supports arbitrary third-party libraries, including those that rely on C code and native extensions. Just add Django 2.0, NumPy, scikit-learn or your library of choice to a requirements.txt file. App Engine will install these libraries in the cloud when you deploy your app.

We're a SaaS platform running on App Engine and were part of the early-access program. Porting over our Python 3 based platform from App Engine Flex to AE Standard took just a few hours - only tweaks needed were to the YAML config files and rewrite our deployment scripts after creating a new environment and project.

We still maintain a docker-based environment on AWS EBS which we were able to port over as well. Overall a fantastic experience. The App Engine Standard team provided stellar support too.

We did notice pure CPU performance on AE standard to be less than dedicated AE Flex instances, but on a price/performance ratio AE standard is 10X better for infrequently accessed micro-services which will allow us to migrate some of these to standard for great cost savings - as well as ramp up auto-scale to handle spikes automagically.

With Python 2 becoming officially deprecated in 2020 this means App Engine Standard just got a huge boost in long term relevance. Great for developers who want to deploy without having to deal with infrastructure.

Good to hear that AE standard - i.e. this vision of a 0-effort Python deployment support - is still relevant after all the Kubernetes-related announcements at Google Next.