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Managed VMs

Limited Preview

This is a Limited Preview release of Managed VMs. As a result, it might be changed in backward-incompatible ways and is not recommended for production use. It is not subject to any SLA or deprecation policy. Request to be whitelisted to use this feature .

When your App Engine application is running in the cloud, Google provides a scalable number of instances of your app's modules. Each instance runs in its own hosting environment. From the beginning, the App Engine hosting environment has been a sandbox, containing your code, a webserver, and a language runtime. Aside from your application code, the other components in the App Engine hosting environment are immutable and managed by Google. The language runtime is customized in order to enforce the sandbox constraints, disabling some of the standard language APIs (such as access to the file system).

App Engine now offers a second hosting option: Managed VMs. The Managed VM hosting environment lets you run App Engine applications on configurable Compute Engine Virtual Machines (VMs). This VM-based hosting environment offers more flexibility and provides more CPU and memory options. Applications that run on Managed VMs, are not subject to Java and Python runtime restrictions and they have access to all the Compute Engine machine types . You can also add third-party libraries and frameworks to your app.

Google manages the underlying VM hosting environment, ensuring that:

• instances are health-checked, healed as necessary, and collocated with other module instances within the project
• critical, backwards compatible updates are automatically rolled out to the underlying operating system

You use the existing app.yaml, appengine-web.xml configuration files, and App Engine SDK tools to develop and deploy applications to Managed VMs.

Runtime support

The Managed VM hosting environment currently supports the following runtimes:

• Java 7
• Python 2.7
• Go

Service API support

The Java, Python, and Go Managed VM hosting environments currently support the following service APIs:

• Datastore
• Memcache
• Task Queues
• Logging
• Users

Managed VM Considerations

When deciding whether it's appropriate to use Managed VMs for your application, you should consider how the Managed VM hosting environment is different from the sandboxed App Engine hosting environment, and how Managed VMs differ from Google Compute Engine VMs.

This table summarizes the different ways the Managed VM and App Engine hosting environments behave:

Also, note that Managed VMs differ from Compute Engine VMs in the following ways:

• Managed VMs are restarted on a weekly basis. During restarts Google’s management services will apply any necessary OS and security updates. Your application's image will remain the same across restarts.
• Users always have root access to Compute Engine VMs. Root and SSH access to Managed VMs is disabled by default. This ensures that the fleet of compute instances is homogenous and manageable. You can enable access to Managed VMs; see Accessing VMs .
• Managed VMs are automatically located by geographical region according to the settings in your project. Google’s management services will insure that all the Managed VMs for a project are co-located for optimal performance.

Sign up and create a Managed VM project

Managed VMs are in Limited Preview, you must sign up for access to this feature, create a billing-enabled project, and tell us about your project so we can whitelist it to run in a Managed VM. Follow these steps:

1. Sign up for access to Managed VMs.
2. Join the app-engine-managed-vms Google Group to participate in discussions about Managed VMs.
3. Projects (or apps - they are the same thing) must be in a U.S. data center. If you're planning to use an existing project, skip to the next step. Otherwise, create a new app in a U.S. data center. Navigate to https://preview.appengine.google.com and create a new app.
4. Enable billing for the project. Visit the page https://cloud.google.com/console/project/apps~<app_id>, where <app_id> is the ID of your project. Click on Settings in the left menu and then enable billing. If your app is billed under a Premier account, email us at [email protected] to have your new Cloud project billed under the same account.
5. Send an email to [email protected] with the application ID in the subject line.

When we receive your email, we’ll configure some resources behind the scenes and notify you via email when your project is ready to go. The email includes final instructions for setup. If you encounter an error while following these instructions, contact us at [email protected] .