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For the moment, unfortunately it appears this second generation also lacks some of the great parts of the older platform. For example, with the shiny new GAE St

For the moment, unfortunately it appears this second generation also lacks some of the great parts of the older platform. For example, with the shiny new GAE Standard Node Beta, you can't declaratively put your app behind authentication, you can't access the (extraordinarily useful) work queue feature from the older GAE, and probably more I have forgotten about for the moment. I hope that stuff is missing just temporarily - there is a lot of genius in the original GAE.

floatboth 8y ago
genius… or vendor lock-in?
- myelin 8y ago
  Member of the App Engine team here. In the context of the second-generation runtimes, this is one of the big reasons we're pushing people to use standard libraries and public cloud services rather than App Engine specific services accessed through syscall magic that doesn't work elsewhere. We want you to be able to run your app locally or on a non-Google server (or on Flex, GCE, GKE, etc).
  - detaro 8y ago
    You should really consider either very detailed porting guides or compatibility libraries, at least from what I hear those required changes will keep some projects on first-gen otherwise (and thus Python 2, and thus requests to dependencies to please keep Python 2 supported and ...)
wasd 8y ago
Based on some comments from Python 3 on GAE Standard [1], I think Cloud Task supersedes queue. DSL Authentication sounds cool though. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717045
derefr 8y ago
The first-generation GAE Standard Environment felt a lot like† programming in a port of the given language's runtime to a "cluster OS" like Mesos or Plan9—except it went even further: rather than the "GAE OS" just exposing things like "the cluster's KV storage" as a character device, and then making language runtimes implement a userland protocol library to speak to it over that device, the GAE OS's ABI just has system calls for things like key-value storage or job-queuing (calls which aren't even parameterized by a handle, since there's only one possible kvstore you could mean—the cluster's.) The language runtime ports are, then, essentially just exposing those system-calls, 1:1. It reminds me a lot of being back in the 80s, when you could write raw assembly that simply called BIOS interrupts to read and write from a disk (by logical disk number!), rather than there being this whole edifice of an OS kernel in between, mapping high-level conceits like logical disk requests to low-level SCSI/ATA/etc. wire protocol messages. That mapping was instead happening at a firmware level, such that the hardware (the CPU) could expose intrinsics that would look like any other ISA instruction, but which would turn around and use the firmware (the BIOS) to execute the instruction. That BIOS-interrupt style really feels, to me, like how computers should be: rather than everything compiling down to RISC code that inevitably gets bogged down in kernel context switches as it attempts to express its intent through thousands of low-level system calls, why not have an ultra-high-level CISC ISA that can just express its intent to the hardware [and firmware] directly, with no impedance mismatch? All the "expansion" of intent to RISC would happen in ring 0, with no switching back and forth. (A good example of this kind of CISC-expression-of-intent: kernel packet filtering.) Or, if you don't want to go that far: why not an abstract machine, like the JVM, with these hyper-CISC semantics? I know there's already one example of this approach in the way Erlang's BEAM VM implements its "send" instruction. In the expensive cases—when a module is not loaded in the local VM, or when you need to send the message to a remote node over the distribution protocol with a custom transport—the "send" op can bounce back down into calling other Erlang modules (essentially "firmware"!) to get its job done. I'd love an abstract machine that had that approach... but for everything. --- † I say "felt a lot like", but from my understanding, this is how it actually was/is! GAE Standard Environment v1's interpreters are compiled as Portable Native Client [PNaCl] binaries, with extensions to the "ABI side" of the PPAPI for the specific services the Native Client VM host provided to its guest. The language runtimes then 1:1 expose these PNaCl instruction-set extensions as the functions of modules like ndb, taskqueue, etc.
jkaplowitz 8y ago
Anyone know if Cloud IAP can handle at least some of the auth wall use cases in this environment, and how to do it? I suspect yes, but the last time I checked the Cloud IAP docs (for GAE standard's recent Python 3.7 launch) they didn't yet address the unique situation of second-generation App Engine standard environment runtimes.

floatboth 8y ago

genius… or vendor lock-in?

myelin 8y ago
Member of the App Engine team here. In the context of the second-generation runtimes, this is one of the big reasons we're pushing people to use standard libraries and public cloud services rather than App Engine specific services accessed through syscall magic that doesn't work elsewhere. We want you to be able to run your app locally or on a non-Google server (or on Flex, GCE, GKE, etc).
- detaro 8y ago
  You should really consider either very detailed porting guides or compatibility libraries, at least from what I hear those required changes will keep some projects on first-gen otherwise (and thus Python 2, and thus requests to dependencies to please keep Python 2 supported and ...)

wasd 8y ago

Based on some comments from Python 3 on GAE Standard [1], I think Cloud Task supersedes queue. DSL Authentication sounds cool though. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717045

derefr 8y ago

The first-generation GAE Standard Environment felt a lot like† programming in a port of the given language's runtime to a "cluster OS" like Mesos or Plan9—except it went even further: rather than the "GAE OS" just exposing things like "the cluster's KV storage" as a character device, and then making language runtimes implement a userland protocol library to speak to it over that device, the GAE OS's ABI just has system calls for things like key-value storage or job-queuing (calls which aren't even parameterized by a handle, since there's only one possible kvstore you could mean—the cluster's.) The language runtime ports are, then, essentially just exposing those system-calls, 1:1. It reminds me a lot of being back in the 80s, when you could write raw assembly that simply called BIOS interrupts to read and write from a disk (by logical disk number!), rather than there being this whole edifice of an OS kernel in between, mapping high-level conceits like logical disk requests to low-level SCSI/ATA/etc. wire protocol messages. That mapping was instead happening at a firmware level, such that the hardware (the CPU) could expose intrinsics that would look like any other ISA instruction, but which would turn around and use the firmware (the BIOS) to execute the instruction. That BIOS-interrupt style really feels, to me, like how computers should be: rather than everything compiling down to RISC code that inevitably gets bogged down in kernel context switches as it attempts to express its intent through thousands of low-level system calls, why not have an ultra-high-level CISC ISA that can just express its intent to the hardware [and firmware] directly, with no impedance mismatch? All the "expansion" of intent to RISC would happen in ring 0, with no switching back and forth. (A good example of this kind of CISC-expression-of-intent: kernel packet filtering.) Or, if you don't want to go that far: why not an abstract machine, like the JVM, with these hyper-CISC semantics? I know there's already one example of this approach in the way Erlang's BEAM VM implements its "send" instruction. In the expensive cases—when a module is not loaded in the local VM, or when you need to send the message to a remote node over the distribution protocol with a custom transport—the "send" op can bounce back down into calling other Erlang modules (essentially "firmware"!) to get its job done. I'd love an abstract machine that had that approach... but for everything. --- † I say "felt a lot like", but from my understanding, this is how it actually was/is! GAE Standard Environment v1's interpreters are compiled as Portable Native Client [PNaCl] binaries, with extensions to the "ABI side" of the PPAPI for the specific services the Native Client VM host provided to its guest. The language runtimes then 1:1 expose these PNaCl instruction-set extensions as the functions of modules like ndb, taskqueue, etc.

jkaplowitz 8y ago

Anyone know if Cloud IAP can handle at least some of the auth wall use cases in this environment, and how to do it? I suspect yes, but the last time I checked the Cloud IAP docs (for GAE standard's recent Python 3.7 launch) they didn't yet address the unique situation of second-generation App Engine standard environment runtimes.