The new Cloud Console designed for developers

In June, we unveiled the new Google Cloud Console, bringing together all of Google’s APIs, Services, and Infrastructure in a single interface. Across Google, we want to make sure that you have an easy way to work and build across all of our platforms. That’s why we’re focusing on improvements to the Cloud Console so you can get things done faster.



We’re introducing a new navigation bar, making it easier to switch between pages. The new bar is designed to automatically resize- expanding sections as you need them and collapsing them when you don’t.

Our URL design got some love as well. In addition to being user-visible, URLs are useful permalinks to specific views for bookmarking and sharing. We’ve heard this feedback from several developers, and our response is our new RESTful, human-readable URL structure.

There are changes behind the scenes as well. The Google Cloud Console is implemented on Google App Engine, and as of this redesign we are now using Angular JS as well. App Engine makes it easy for us to build a RESTful, autoscaling backend to power our app, and Angular JS makes it simple to communicate with our backend to dynamically render content in the frontend.



This refresh is a first step towards improving your experience, and we are just getting started. Going forward, we’re working on a set of design standards and shared components that we’ll adopt throughout all of our services in the console. We’re also continually running user studies to study common developer workflows to see how we can improve them. If you would be interested in participating in any of these studies, please sign up here.

-Posted by Akshay Kannan, Product Manager

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TweetDeck and Google App Engine A Match Made in the Cloud

Im Reza and work in London, UK for a startup called TweetDeck. Our vision is to develop the best tools to manage and filter real time information streams like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. We offer products like our TweetDeck desktop client built on Adobe AIR, and our iPhone application. We are happy to say that we use App Engine as key part in our backend.

Were a small startup, so early on we started to look for tools that would give us the biggest bang for our buck. Combined with the fact we love Python, we thought it might be worth taking a look at what Google App Engine had to offer. The first feature we started playing with was the mail sending facility.

It was easy! Sending mail was a single call-- no messing around. Combined with the fact that it was sent via tried-and-tested Google Mail servers, this meant that we had a simple mailing solution where we didnt have to deal with spam blacklists, mail retries or SPF records. We could really see App Engine being our sole email provider for transactional emails (new users and forgotten passwords), but also for newsletter-type mailing.

When we got started, our existing backend was hosted on Amazon EC2 and SimpleDB, and we knew that we needed a way for the two systems to communicate with each other. App Engine provides all the basic tools to define any sort of resources you want--but more importantly, it has the Python standard library. We implemented a small mail API, with authentication provided by an HMAC-SHA1 of the request information and a shared secret key. The API has been made extremely general: its JSON input format contains fields to send messages to blocks of email addresses that are either defined in the request itself, or which exist as a template in App Engine (templates are defined as strings in a Python module).

The whole setup currently works quite well. Were already extending our mailing system to use App Engines task queues-- exposing a number of queues to break large mailing jobs into a series of subtasks, thus spreading mailing sending over a large period of time. We have plans to make an even tighter bridge between our EC2 systems and App Engine, which involves keeping our subscriber list entirely in App Engine, and adding and removing from that list as appropriate.

We also use App Engine for various other prototypes and smaller applications that are part of our product. We use it to serve our "TweetDeck Recommends" feed, and weve even developed small tools to apply TweetDeck fan badges on Twitter homepage backgrounds using the Imaging API! The lesson from us, of course, is that using something like App Engine doesnt have to mean everything runs on it. Its an extremely good platform for creating APIs or smaller parts of your application that do specific tasks, and do them well. Think of it as the UNIX metaphor applied to the Cloud.

We love that weve been able to grow the functionality that Tweetdeck provides by progressively using more of the cloud. App Engine provides the perfect platform to compose new services quickly, iterate on them in production, and scale with demand as Tweetdecks install base grows. Thanks to App Engine and the cloud, theres nothing holding us back from tackling the needs of our user base.

Here is a video interview of Reza and the Tweetdeck team.

Guest Post by Reza Lotun @rlotun, TweetDeck

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R GA shares why digital agencies are turning to the cloud

We believe that building in the cloud is a quicker way to build new apps, but just how quick? Michael Piccuirro, director at R/GA, told us, “things that we would have taken years to build, we’ll be able to produce in weeks or months.”



R/GA is an international digital marketing agency that develops large, interactive experiences for its clients, working with brands such as Nike, Johnson & Johnson and MasterCard. In Michael’s words, R/GA chose Google Cloud Platform “because it’s a great tool that allows us to build solutions very quickly and deploy them somewhere that can scale to whatever we need.”



Check out this video to hear it all in Michael’s own words:







- Posted by Benjamin Bechtolsheim, Product Marketing Manager

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