Earlier this year, the Google Cloud team introduced a series of codelabs (free, online, self-paced, hands-on tutorials) designed for technical practitioners modernizing their serverless applications. Today, we're excited to announce companion videos, forming a set of "learning modules" made up of these videos and their corresponding codelab tutorials. Modernizing your applications allows you to access continuing product innovation and experience a more open Google Cloud. The initial content is designed with App Engine developers in mind, our earliest users, to help you take advantage of the latest features in Google Cloud. Here are some of the key migrations and why they benefit you:
ndb library is used to access Datastore. Cloud NDB gives developers
the same NDB-style idiom but provides Datastore access to applications
outside of App Engine as well as helps existing users upgrade to Python
3.
taskqueue service is still available, new features and continuing
innovation are going into Cloud Tasks, its
standalone equivalent letting users create and execute App Engine and
non-App Engine tasks.
The "Serverless Migration
Station" videos are part of the long-running Serverless Expeditions series you
may already be familiar with. In each video, Google engineer Martin Omander and I explore a
variety of different modernization techniques. Viewers will be given an overview of the task
at hand, a deeper-dive screencast takes a closer look at the code or configuration files, and
most importantly, illustrates to developers the migration steps necessary to transform the
same sample app across each migration.
The baseline sample app is a simple Python 2 App Engine NDB and webapp2 application. It
registers every web page visit (saving visiting IP address and browser/client type) and
displays the most recent queries. The entire application is shown below, featuring
Visit as the data Kind, the store_visit()
and fetch_visits() functions, and the main application handler,
MainHandler.
import os
import webapp2
from google.appengine.ext import ndb
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
class Visit(ndb.Model):
'Visit entity registers visitor IP address & timestamp'
visitor = ndb.StringProperty()
timestamp = ndb.DateTimeProperty(auto_now_add=True)
def store_visit(remote_addr, user_agent):
'create new Visit entity in Datastore'
Visit(visitor='{}: {}'.format(remote_addr, user_agent)).put()
def fetch_visits(limit):
'get most recent visits'
return (v.to_dict() for v in Visit.query().order(
-Visit.timestamp).fetch(limit))
class MainHandler(webapp2.RequestHandler):
'main application (GET) handler'
def get(self):
store_visit(self.request.remote_addr, self.request.user_agent)
visits = fetch_visits(10)
tmpl = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'index.html')
self.response.out.write(template.render(tmpl, {'visits': visits}))
app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([
('/', MainHandler),
], debug=True)
Upon deploying this application to App Engine, users will get output similar to the following:
This application is the subject of today's launch video, and the
main.py file above along with other application and configuration
files can be found in the Module
0 repo folder.
Each migration learning module covers one modernization technique. A video outlines the migration while the codelab leads developers through it. Developers will always get a starting codebase ("START") and learn how to do a specific migration, resulting in a completed codebase ("FINISH"). Developers can hit the reset button (back to START) if something goes wrong or compare their solutions to ours (FINISH). The hands-on experience helps users build muscle-memory for when they're ready to do their own migrations.
All of the migration learning modules, corresponding Serverless Migration Station videos (when published), codelab tutorials, START and FINISH code, etc., can all be found in the migration repo. While there's an initial focus on Python 2 and App Engine, you'll also find content for Python 3 users as well as non-App Engine users. We're looking into similar content for other legacy languages as well so stay tuned. We hope you find all these resources helpful in your quest to modernize your serverless apps!
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