Hi Tim, sorry for the late reply but I've been working on a novella for you :-)
I'm a technical program manager from the GCP support team. I work on community-facing support (which is just part of our support <http://cloud.google.com/support> offering) for all of GCP, including App Engine. On Friday, March 31, 2017 at 8:39:29 AM UTC-4, Tim Consolazio wrote: > > I've been noticing some things: > - App Engine support shunted over to Stack Overflow (so...a non-Google > community resource). > It turns out that if you search for a particular error message from one of our products, you're very likely to see a Stack Overflow question about that very message among the first results. So yes, we lose some control, but the Stack Overflow community is pretty good at maintaining a high quality Q&A site. Given that our goal is for every interaction to help as many people as possible, it makes sense to go where the users are. I should point out that we actively monitor this Google Group and bug reports on issuetracker.google.com, not just Stack Overflow. The difference is in focus: Stack Overflow is a place for "I know what I want to do, but not quite how" type Q&A. - Mail API pretty much deprecated (no more quota expansions, 100 email > limit). > You're right, that's not great. A while ago, Kim Lewandowski mentioned <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/XvGmvutEVx8/tqEBDVevCAAJ> that we're investigating a solution to the issues that plague the current mail API. There's currently a thread going about this; please take Kim up on her offer <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/p3tma8eFCM4/Hj0WBV7eAgAJ> to share use cases. > - Deprecation of Channel API (sure we have Firebase, but still...what's > the commitment to that?) > Since I work for support and not product management I can only speak informally, but Firebase is a product with a lot of integrations across Google products. This isn't one I'd worry about. Also notice the byline <https://firebase.google.com/> and linked article <https://firebase.google.com/features/functions/> on Firebase's homepage pointing out the integration of Firebase and Cloud Functions. > - No Java 8 (and 7 was a long time in coming). > I think Jeff already covered this one :-) > - Gradual deprecation of local SDK in favor of remote/virtual dev (which > to me is unacceptable, I depend on that local SDK). > My colleague Justin Beckwith talked about this <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/5esgvujAqIQ/bf6xHfImBwAJ> a few months ago: we understand that local development is an important feature and are looking at how to enable it in gcloud. But since it's not ready yet, we do continue to maintain the standalone SDK. > > I frequently recommend App Engine (and I've built quite a few apps on it). > I've been a rogue evangelist of the platform for years (since it was > released in fact), and have been contracted by Google three times to build > applications using it. So I'm not a hater in any way. > > But I can't look at these events (particularly the Stack Overflow thing) > and ignore the impression that App Engine is beginning to feel more like a > side project rather than a commercial offering with full resource > commitment by the vendor. > I've spoken to your point about Stack Overflow already, but I hope you're not reading too much into things like Datastore becoming a first-class product instead of an App Engine-only feature. That sort of transition acknowledges the reality there are several models for cloud compute, and that a lot of features which launched as part of App Engine (when App Engine was our sole compute offering) make just as much sense when used with containers, or VMs, or Cloud Functions. > > Curious about a formal statement of commitment here, and a complete > roadmap of what we can reasonably expect over say, the next two years. > > We've mentioned this before, but there are a lot of reasons for us to be tight-lipped about our exact roadmap. But I hope that seeing real progress like the Flexible Environment exiting Beta or upcoming Java 8 on Standard <https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-intellij/issues/946> demonstrate our commitment to App Engine. Regards, Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/12559c6a-764d-4084-a7e2-83a6c71297ef%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
