Google Cloud – App Engine SDK v1.6.1 Released

Just catching up with things after Christmas, one thing that escaped my notice in December was that Google released version 1.6.1 of their Cloud App Engine SDK on 13th. of December. There’s not a huge amount of interest really in this release, but two items did catch my eye:

You can now select how much CPU power and memory is available for your fronted instances, you can select this from a small set of presets in the app dashboard – however google warns that selecting a higher preset will incur extra cost! We sometimes run into soft memory limit problems on our frontends so this may be of great use to us, but I do worry about the $$ !

Google have also released a new experimental document conversion API which they say contains OCR functionality – I look forward to testing this and will be very interested to see how well the OCR preforms as it can be a very tricky thing to get right! I suppose that this is an API to the same OCR functionality that they have in google docs….

Oh and they have added an API for programmatically reading the application logs, this may come in handy for automated testing!

More details about the release can be found here:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/12/app-engine-161-released.html