Hey everyone,

If you don't already subscribe to our blog in your RSS reader, I advise that
you do so:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/announcing-high-replication-datastore.html

I've embedded the post below. This is a feature that I'm very excited about.
Feel free to post to this thread if you have any questions.

Announcing the High Replication Datastore for App
Engine<http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/announcing-high-replication-datastore.html>

When App Engine launched over two years ago, we offered a Datastore that was
designed for quick, strongly consistent reads. It was based on a
Master/Slave replication topology, designed for fast writes while still
allowing applications to see data immediately after it was written. For the
past six months, as you are probably aware, we’ve been struggling with
some reliability
issues<http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/datastore-performance-growing-pains.html>
with
the App Engine Datastore. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve made
major strides in fixing these issues. However, our experience with these
issues has made us rethink some of our design assumptions. As we promised
you in some of our outage
reports<https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/msg/e9414ee6493da6fb?pli=1>
earlier
this year, we wanted to give you a more fundamental solution to the problem.

Today I’m proud to announce the availability of a new Datastore
configuration option, the High Replication Datastore. The High Replication
Datastore provides the highest level of availability for your reads and
writes, at the cost of increased latency for writes and changes in
consistency guarantees in the API. The High Replication Datastore increases
the number of data centers that maintain replicas of your data by
using the Paxos
algorithm <http://labs.google.com/papers/paxos_made_live.html> to
synchronize that data across datacenters in real time. One of the most
significant benefits is that all functionality of your application will
remain fully available during planned maintenance periods, as well as during
most unplanned infrastructure issues. A more detailed comparison between
these two options is available in our
documentation<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/hr/>
.

>From now on, when creating a new application, you will be able to select the
Datastore configuration for your application. While the current Datastore
configuration default remains Master/Slave, this may change in the future.
<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dLfQMJsmsaI/TSTL4Cwfg3I/AAAAAAAAAI8/LR_gHxATJto/s1600/hr.png>
Datastore configuration options when creating an app.

The datastore configuration option can not be changed once an application is
created, and all existing applications today are using the Master/Slave
configuration. To help existing apps migrate their data to an app using the
High Replication Datastore, we are providing some migration tools to assist
you. First, we have introduced an option in the Admin Console that allows an
application toserve in read-only
mode<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/applicationsettings.html#Disable_Datastore_Writes>
so
that the data may be reliably copied between apps. Secondly, we are
providing a migration tool with the Python SDK that allows you to copy from
one app to another. Directions on how to use this tool for Python and Java
apps is documented
here<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/datastoreadmin.html#Copying_Entities_to_Another_Application>
.

Now, a word on pricing: Because the amount of data replication significantly
increases with the High Replication datastore, the price of this datastore
configuration is different. But because we believe that this new
configuration offers a significantly improved experience for some
applications, we wanted to make it available to you as soon as possible,
even though we haven’t finalized the pricing details. Thus, we are releasing
the High Replication Datastore with introductory pricing of 3x that of the
Master/Slave Datastore until the end of July 2011. After July, we expect
that pricing of this feature will change. We’ll let you know more about the
pricing details as soon as they are available, and remember, you are always
protected when pricing changes occur by our Terms of
Service<http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html>.
Due to the higher cost, we thus recommend the High Replication Datastore
primarily for those developers building critical applications on App Engine
who want the highest possible level of availability for their application.

Thank you, everyone, for all the work you’ve put into building applications
on App Engine for the past two years. We’re excited to have High Replication
Datastore as the first of many exciting launches in the new year, and hope
you’re excited about the other things we’ve got in store for App Engine in
2011.
Posted by Kevin Gibbs, The App Engine Team



--
Ikai Lan
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine
Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com
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