Google revamps Apps Engine

Google has revamped its App Engine to combat reliability issues in its Datastore.

Writing on the Google application engine blog, Kevin Gibbs, from the Google App Engine Team, said, "Over the course of the past few months we've made major strides in fixing these issues. However, our experience with these issues has made us rethink some of our design assumptions. As we promised you in some of our outage reports earlier this year, we wanted to give you a more fundamental solution to the problem."

The result is a new Datastore configuration option, the High Replication Datastore, which Gibbs said provides the highest level of availability for reads and writes, but at a cost. Database writes suffer from increased latency.

The High Replication Datastore uses a Paxos algorithm to synchronise data across datacentres in real time, and is designed to provide fault-tolerant replication of data.