Two years after Google announced beta availability of its App Engine for PHP, the company has finally made it generally available.
The announcement means that the company’s App Engine service-level agreement and deprecation policy now cover PHP apps running on Google’s Cloud Platform.
The general availability news was one of three updates pertaining to Google’s Cloud Platform that the company announced at a road show in San Francisco this week. Another involved HTC announcing plans to use the Google platform for all mobile app development going forward, and the third announcement was a new Google Cloud SQL connector from Tableau.
Tens of thousands of developers have already built and deployed PHP applications on App Engine, Google software engineer Stuart Langley said in a posting on the Google Cloud Platform Blog. Google’s Cloud Platform already handles more than 800 million PHP queries each week, he said.
“To put that in perspective, if we printed each PHP-generated Web page viewed on App Engine each day on a single sheet of paper and stacked them in a tower, it would be over seven miles high,” Langley said.
The popularity of the service among PHP developers stems from the multiple benefits that App Engine offers, he said. For instance, App Engine’s security controls and its ability to patch underlying infrastructure automatically help reduce the susceptibility of PHP applications to threats like shell-injection attacks and the Heartbleed security flaw.
Similarly, App Engine’s auto-scaling feature enables applications that are running on it to scale from tens to thousands of queries per second in response to changing requirements and scale down just as quickly when the extra capacity is no longer needed. Managed services, such as a user authentication API and data store, also help developers to enable high-availability support for their applications, Langley said.
Google offers a free entry-level tier for PHP developers looking to build and host apps on App Engine. The free quota tops out at 28 instance hours per app, per day, 1GB of outgoing and incoming network traffic, 5GB of cloud storage and email app support for up to 100 recipients.
Meanwhile, Tableau Software announced a Google SQL Cloud Connector that will allow enterprises using Tableau to easily and directly connect to data stored in Google’s Cloud Platform. In a press release, the company described Google SQL as technology that offers MySQL-like functionality that is ideal for small and midsize applications. The “new connector will provide Tableau and Google Cloud SQL customers with an easy way to see and understand their data,” the company said.
Tableau already has connectors to Google Analytics and Google BigQuery. By adding the Cloud SQL connector, customers of Tableau and Google are now one step closer to being able to host their analytics applications completely in the cloud, the company said.
In a separate announcement, HTC said it has built a new mobile app framework on the Google Cloud Platform that will allow the company to build apps faster and more efficiently.
A combination of tools, such as Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Datastore, have allowed HTC to enable a better user experience while freeing up developer time, John Song, HTC’s senior director of cloud computing, said in a guest post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog. HTC’s decision to use Google’s cloud hosted service was driven by a need for better reliability and more efficient bandwidth usage, he said.
