Google App Engine Update Adds Multi-Tenancy

App Engine version 1.3.6 now features multi-tenancy support, or the ability to run more than one, or multiple, instances of an application. Google App Engine's multi-tenancy support uses the Namespaces API, which lets multiple organizations, or tenants, all run the same applications. Data is segregated using a unique namespace for each client, Google's App Engine development team wrote in a blog post.

"This allows you to easily serve the same app to multiple different customers, with each customer seeing their own unique copy of the app," Google wrote. "No changes in your code are necessary to use this API – just a little extra configuration. Further, the API is also designed to be very customizable, with hooks into your code that you can control, so you can set up multi-tenancy in any way you choose."

Multi-tenancy support lets application developers and solution providers serve the same app to different clients requiring only minor changes when certain customizations are required.

Along with adding multi-tenancy support, Google has also updated App Engine to now add high-performance image serving and relaxed data storage quotas.

The new high-performance image serving system is based on the same infrastructure Google leverages to serve Picasa images and lets developers generate a stable, dedicated URL for serving Web-suitable image thumbnails. Users store a single copy of the original image and then request a high-performance per-image URL that can serve that imaged resized or cropped without any CPU or dynamic server load on a specific application.

Meanwhile, Google also lifted some of App Engine's system limitations and the Datastore no longer enforces a 1,000 entity limit on count and offset. Queries using those will now execute until they return or the application reaches the request timeout limit. Google has also raised nearly all of the burst quotas for free apps to the same level as the burst quotas for billed apps.

Other features packed into the Google App Engine update include custom error pages; task queue pausing via the Admin Console interface; and dashboard graphs in the Admin Console that show 30 days of data.