AppScale 1.7.0 Released!

[Chris Bunch]

Hi all,
   We're happy to announce the release of AppScale 1.7.0! After three weeks of development and two weeks of QA, we're happy to have fixed the following bugs and added the following features:

- System-level logging for admin user

- Fixed 'none' in database name, replication, and monitoring URL
- Speed up performance of AppDashboard
- Implement log levels for the AppController
- Prime AppDashboard before sending users to it
- Extend timeout from 30 to 60 minutes for images to boot in Eucalyptus.
- Add AppStats support for Python 2.7 App Engine apps.
- Refactor AppController's loging to not have everything at the DEBUG level.
- Namespacing now handled correctly by the datastore server.
- Uploading large apps from web UI now succeeds
- Updating login cookie at AppDashboard when apps are uploaded or deleted.
- Static secure files no longer lead to redirect loops.
- Channel API support for Java App Engine apps.
- Remove runtime checks for invalid Java classes from SDK.
- Mail API support for Java App Engine apps.
- AppDashboard now stores API status in Datastore
- AppController dying no longer kills the AppDashboard
- Resolved ndb deadlock issues with AppDashboard
- Fixed Cron API on Eucalyptus
- Altered build script to fail if any component fails to install
- Fixed 'appscale down' / terminate-instances when running on an AppScale image
- Apps can now be updated without first having to remove them
- Using Kazoo for ZooKeeper interactions, fixing NFS stale file handle errors
- Added EC2_SECRET_KEY and EC2_ACCESS_KEY args for AppScalefile
- Removed unused JavaScript files in AppDashboard
- 'verbose: False' now omits verbose flag in 'appscale up'
- Bulk loader now generates kind statistics
- Added bulk loader support for Java App Engine apps
- Java App Engine apps now support multithreading
- AppDashboard now uses graphical representations of numeric data
- Fixed XMPPReceiver, which broke with new AppDashboard implementation
- Cleaning up soft deleted items periodically
- ndb no longer sees memcache entries as corrupt
- Removed update SDK message from Java App Server
- Fixed bug where XMPP would fail for Java App Engine apps with capital letters in appid
- appscale.deploy now returns the host and port of the app that was deployed
- Enable AES support for apps that use pycrypto
- Properly adding lxml to dev_appserver's import path
- Removed AppDashboard's font references in CSS to files that don't exist
- Allow users to upload tar files with the app in a top-level directory
- When doing an 'appscale clean', we now remove local state in ~/.appscale
- Fixed starting AppScale on EC2 with a one node deployment, with --ips_layout
- Using retries when performing Kazoo operations with ZooKeeper
- appscale-upload-app now uses unique tempdir locations when uploading apps
- Uploading apps via web UI no longer throws 404s
- Large apps no longer timeout nginx when uploaded via the AppDashboard
- Using glob when importing Python libraries in dev_appserver
- Refreshing application names consistently in AppDashboard
- Caching AppController status at login node, resolving SOAP timeouts in Dashboard
- Improved stability for AppDashboard in Euca deployments

As usual, we have both the source and public AMI available. Here are some links:

The main source, at https://github.com/AppScale/AppScale
The tools source, at https://github.com/appscale/appscale-tools
A public Amazon EC2 ami, ami-b58be4dc (for the US East Region), and ami-adb1a7d9 (for the EU Ireland Region).

Links for KVM, VirtualBox, and Eucalyptus images can be found at http://downloads.appscale.com

We're heading off to Google I/O tomorrow through Friday, so we'll be prioritizing our product backlog to determine which issues to take on next week. Early next week, we'll add a Trello board (https://trello.com/appscalesystems), so join us and see what we're up to!

Of course, file any bugs you run into at https://github.com/AppScale/AppScale/issues for the main source and https://github.com/appscale/appscale-tools/issues for the tools source so that we can prioritize them and address them. You can also find us on #appscale on freenode if you run into problems or the like.

And as always, thanks for using AppScale!